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144144Democracy Now! - Guatemalaen-USDemocracy Now! - GuatemalaPt. 2: A Massacre in Guatemala: Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú on 1980 Fire That Killed Her Fatherhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2015/1/20/pt_2_a_massacre_in_guatemala
tag:democracynow.org,2015-01-20:blog/e6613b Watch Part 2 of our conversation with Rigoberta Menchú following Monday&#8217;s sentencing of former Guatemalan police chief Pedro García Arredondo. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest government repression. One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, Rigoberta&#8217;s father. For years, Rigoberta has fought for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
Watch Part 1 of interview here
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. We&#8217;re continuing to talk about the former Guatemalan dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, who is now being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early &#39;80s. He was the president, the dictator, from 1982 to &#8217;83. At a trial in 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years, but the ruling was overturned less than two weeks later. Guatemala&#39;s highest court dismissed all the case&#8217;s proceedings in order to retrial on technical grounds, but human rights activists say the court caved to political pressure from Guatemala&#8217;s ruling elite. Since then, 88-year-old Ríos Montt has been under house arrest and earlier this month failed to attend a court hearing. It&#8217;s currently unclear when his retrial will resume.
We&#8217;re continuing our conversation with Nobel Peace Prize-winning laureate Rigoberta Menchú at her offices in Guatemala City, largely responsible for making sure Ríos Montt was brought to justice. She began the process more than a decade ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. And here in New York, filmmaker Pam Yates joins us, her most recent documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt.
So, we wanted to go back to Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. In the first part of this discussion, we talked about what happened in this trial and the trial of the police chief who was responsible for the massacre at the Spanish Embassy that killed Rigoberta&#8217;s father and 36 others. But we ended that conversation talking about larger responsibility, particularly at the level of the Guatemalan government and the U.S. government that backed it. Rigoberta Menchú, if you could continue with what you were saying?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] For years, the relevant documentation was hidden or erased and kept from public view. That documentation and those extensive dossiers are now before the courts and have been presented to the courts. A part of the massacre at the Spanish Embassy has been documented that six different police units participated and basically created a siege around the embassy so that nobody could leave the embassy alive. And similarly, in the course of the internal armed conflict, entire villages were wiped out, with the same intention that nobody would survive to tell the story.
AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your father and the work he was doing organizing peasants in the face of very harsh repression?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] My father was a natural-born leader. Since 1952, he organized and led peasants to struggle for land. He has really an amazing trajectory as a peasant leader. He helped to improve our seeds, to organize cooperatives, to improve the agricultural techniques that we used for planting. He did amazing things. He played a very important role in the history of the struggle of peasant farmers in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : What was the weapon you said was used that helped destroy the Spanish Embassy, that led to the death of your father and so many others?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, it has been presented and proved in court that there were two sources of fire in the Spanish Embassy. The first was started with an explosion and was where kerosene was probably used. The second source of incineration seems to be something that is quite unusual and extraordinary, given the speed at which it incinerated 37 people who were in the embassy at the time. The evidence points to this not being a regular burn time for a fire. The incineration burned the internal organs of the victims, their lungs and their kidneys. So it was not just a regular kind of fire. So, an apparatus has been photographed that was some kind of fire launcher that sprayed the bodies of the victims. The Spanish government has been documenting this and identifying the arm in question that was used.
AMY GOODMAN : Where do they believe it was from?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] I believe that the investigation determined that it was an Israeli-made weapon. It was carried by a person who had a direct and intimate relationship with Pedro García Arredondo. Pedro García Arredondo was giving orders at the time on the use of this weapon.
AMY GOODMAN : And he was the police chief who was found guilty and sentenced to 90 years in this trial.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] During the trial, a witness A, who is a witness whose name is protected, testified to the effect that this weapon was used and that it was manufactured in Israel.
AARON MATÉ: And, Pamela Yates, the significance of this revelation from the trial that an Israeli weapon was used in the Spanish Embassy fire, pointing to potential Israeli complicity?
PAMELA YATES : Doesn&#8217;t surprise me at all, because when the United States cut off military aid to Guatemala, they got their closest allies to step in: the Argentines and the Israelis. And thus we see a lot of Argentine and a lot of Israeli participation in the war, in the dirty war in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He&#8217;s being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. This is a clip of Judge Yassmin Barrios during the first genocide trial. This is from Pamela Yates&#8217;s web series, Dictator in the Dock .
JUDGE YASSMIN BARRIOS : [translated] In the Ixil area, in the villages and hamlets of Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul, there were violent deaths of human beings, rapes and the razing of villages, which forced the Maya Ixil to flee in order to save their lives. We judges make the following analysis: With regard to the crime of genocide, the expert report from Dr. Elizabeth Ann Oglesby, who explained that the objective was to eliminate the civil population because it was considered that the Ixil people were the base of the guerrilla support.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Judge Barrios. Now, this is very interesting, Pam Yates. At this trial, you had the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, and you had the judge, Judge Barrios—both are women. Talk about the significance of what the judge said. And then, what happened at the end of this trial?
PAMELA YATES : What was incredible was the sentencing of Ríos Montt. The sentencing is the day when you actually read the verdict and then decree the sentence. And she gave the whole narrative of what had happened in the trial, which is actually the story of what had happened in Guatemala. And at the end of it all, she said, &quot;We can never let this happen again. And the reason that we have these courts of justice is to put it all out on the table, strengthen our democracy and move forward. But he is guilty.&quot; So, the significance is just astounding. It means that a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people—first time ever in the world and the Americas—is found guilty of that genocide. This is huge.
You know, many of the genocides in the Americas happened a really long time ago. This one happened 30-odd years ago. So, that it can be brought to trial and that the victims and survivors never gave up on the quest for justice over 30 years also points to the resilience of the Guatemalan people. But it also means that they have to spend a lot of time and energy in these courts, that are not really geared to giving real justice. Let&#8217;s see what happens with the Pedro García Arredondo case and how that verdict holds. But at least we were able to have our day in court, to have the story told and to have the verdict read.
AMY GOODMAN : Rigoberta Menchú, we must end. Do you feel there is hope for your country of Guatemala now?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I do think that there&#8217;s hope for Guatemala. But this hope has a very high price. It&#8217;s a hope that is built by people who take tremendous risks. Many of the witnesses still don&#8217;t want to talk. Many of the victims don&#8217;t want to testify, and they&#8217;re afraid. And they&#8217;re afraid because they&#8217;re criminalized. The victims themselves are criminalized. They&#8217;re stigmatized. They suffer social rejection. There&#8217;s smear campaigns against us. We&#8217;re called liars and leftists and communists. And these words, these accusations, hit us emotionally. They hurt. And also, many of the victims are tired. They&#8217;re ill. Many of them are elders. So, justice is prevailing, but at a tremendous cost. And this justice continues to be painful. So, yes, this is a sign of hope for Guatemala, and it&#8217;s also a sign of hope for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, her father, Don Vicente Menchú, was killed in the 1980 Spanish Embassy massacre in which 37 Guatemalan peasants, activists were killed. She has published many books. Her autobiography is I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala . And thank you very much, Pamela Yates—
PAMELA YATES : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : —filmmaker who in 1983 did the film, When the Mountains Tremble . She also did the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt. And the clip we chose was from Dictator in the Dock , which is a web series?
PAMELA YATES : Twenty-three-episode web series, highlights of the Ríos Montt genocide trial, online.
AMY GOODMAN : At?
PAMELA YATES : Skylight.is .
AMY GOODMAN : And we will link to it at democracynow.org. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Special thanks to Cassandra Smithies.
Watch Part 2 of our conversation with Rigoberta Menchú following Monday’s sentencing of former Guatemalan police chief Pedro García Arredondo. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest government repression. One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, Rigoberta’s father. For years, Rigoberta has fought for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. We’re continuing to talk about the former Guatemalan dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, who is now being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early '80s. He was the president, the dictator, from 1982 to ’83. At a trial in 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years, but the ruling was overturned less than two weeks later. Guatemala's highest court dismissed all the case’s proceedings in order to retrial on technical grounds, but human rights activists say the court caved to political pressure from Guatemala’s ruling elite. Since then, 88-year-old Ríos Montt has been under house arrest and earlier this month failed to attend a court hearing. It’s currently unclear when his retrial will resume.

We’re continuing our conversation with Nobel Peace Prize-winning laureate Rigoberta Menchú at her offices in Guatemala City, largely responsible for making sure Ríos Montt was brought to justice. She began the process more than a decade ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. And here in New York, filmmaker Pam Yates joins us, her most recent documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt.

So, we wanted to go back to Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. In the first part of this discussion, we talked about what happened in this trial and the trial of the police chief who was responsible for the massacre at the Spanish Embassy that killed Rigoberta’s father and 36 others. But we ended that conversation talking about larger responsibility, particularly at the level of the Guatemalan government and the U.S. government that backed it. Rigoberta Menchú, if you could continue with what you were saying?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] For years, the relevant documentation was hidden or erased and kept from public view. That documentation and those extensive dossiers are now before the courts and have been presented to the courts. A part of the massacre at the Spanish Embassy has been documented that six different police units participated and basically created a siege around the embassy so that nobody could leave the embassy alive. And similarly, in the course of the internal armed conflict, entire villages were wiped out, with the same intention that nobody would survive to tell the story.

AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your father and the work he was doing organizing peasants in the face of very harsh repression?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] My father was a natural-born leader. Since 1952, he organized and led peasants to struggle for land. He has really an amazing trajectory as a peasant leader. He helped to improve our seeds, to organize cooperatives, to improve the agricultural techniques that we used for planting. He did amazing things. He played a very important role in the history of the struggle of peasant farmers in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: What was the weapon you said was used that helped destroy the Spanish Embassy, that led to the death of your father and so many others?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, it has been presented and proved in court that there were two sources of fire in the Spanish Embassy. The first was started with an explosion and was where kerosene was probably used. The second source of incineration seems to be something that is quite unusual and extraordinary, given the speed at which it incinerated 37 people who were in the embassy at the time. The evidence points to this not being a regular burn time for a fire. The incineration burned the internal organs of the victims, their lungs and their kidneys. So it was not just a regular kind of fire. So, an apparatus has been photographed that was some kind of fire launcher that sprayed the bodies of the victims. The Spanish government has been documenting this and identifying the arm in question that was used.

AMYGOODMAN: Where do they believe it was from?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] I believe that the investigation determined that it was an Israeli-made weapon. It was carried by a person who had a direct and intimate relationship with Pedro García Arredondo. Pedro García Arredondo was giving orders at the time on the use of this weapon.

AMYGOODMAN: And he was the police chief who was found guilty and sentenced to 90 years in this trial.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] During the trial, a witness A, who is a witness whose name is protected, testified to the effect that this weapon was used and that it was manufactured in Israel.

AARON MATÉ: And, Pamela Yates, the significance of this revelation from the trial that an Israeli weapon was used in the Spanish Embassy fire, pointing to potential Israeli complicity?

PAMELAYATES: Doesn’t surprise me at all, because when the United States cut off military aid to Guatemala, they got their closest allies to step in: the Argentines and the Israelis. And thus we see a lot of Argentine and a lot of Israeli participation in the war, in the dirty war in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go back to the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He’s being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. This is a clip of Judge Yassmin Barrios during the first genocide trial. This is from Pamela Yates’s web series, Dictator in the Dock.

JUDGEYASSMINBARRIOS: [translated] In the Ixil area, in the villages and hamlets of Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul, there were violent deaths of human beings, rapes and the razing of villages, which forced the Maya Ixil to flee in order to save their lives. We judges make the following analysis: With regard to the crime of genocide, the expert report from Dr. Elizabeth Ann Oglesby, who explained that the objective was to eliminate the civil population because it was considered that the Ixil people were the base of the guerrilla support.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Judge Barrios. Now, this is very interesting, Pam Yates. At this trial, you had the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, and you had the judge, Judge Barrios—both are women. Talk about the significance of what the judge said. And then, what happened at the end of this trial?

PAMELAYATES: What was incredible was the sentencing of Ríos Montt. The sentencing is the day when you actually read the verdict and then decree the sentence. And she gave the whole narrative of what had happened in the trial, which is actually the story of what had happened in Guatemala. And at the end of it all, she said, "We can never let this happen again. And the reason that we have these courts of justice is to put it all out on the table, strengthen our democracy and move forward. But he is guilty." So, the significance is just astounding. It means that a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people—first time ever in the world and the Americas—is found guilty of that genocide. This is huge.

You know, many of the genocides in the Americas happened a really long time ago. This one happened 30-odd years ago. So, that it can be brought to trial and that the victims and survivors never gave up on the quest for justice over 30 years also points to the resilience of the Guatemalan people. But it also means that they have to spend a lot of time and energy in these courts, that are not really geared to giving real justice. Let’s see what happens with the Pedro García Arredondo case and how that verdict holds. But at least we were able to have our day in court, to have the story told and to have the verdict read.

AMYGOODMAN: Rigoberta Menchú, we must end. Do you feel there is hope for your country of Guatemala now?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I do think that there’s hope for Guatemala. But this hope has a very high price. It’s a hope that is built by people who take tremendous risks. Many of the witnesses still don’t want to talk. Many of the victims don’t want to testify, and they’re afraid. And they’re afraid because they’re criminalized. The victims themselves are criminalized. They’re stigmatized. They suffer social rejection. There’s smear campaigns against us. We’re called liars and leftists and communists. And these words, these accusations, hit us emotionally. They hurt. And also, many of the victims are tired. They’re ill. Many of them are elders. So, justice is prevailing, but at a tremendous cost. And this justice continues to be painful. So, yes, this is a sign of hope for Guatemala, and it’s also a sign of hope for the world.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, her father, Don Vicente Menchú, was killed in the 1980 Spanish Embassy massacre in which 37 Guatemalan peasants, activists were killed. She has published many books. Her autobiography is I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. And thank you very much, Pamela Yates—

PAMELAYATES: Thank you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: —filmmaker who in 1983 did the film, When the Mountains Tremble. She also did the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt. And the clip we chose was from Dictator in the Dock, which is a web series?

AMYGOODMAN: And we will link to it at democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Special thanks to Cassandra Smithies.

]]>
Tue, 20 Jan 2015 18:53:00 -0500Pt. 2: A Massacre in Guatemala: Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú on 1980 Fire That Killed Her Father Watch Part 2 of our conversation with Rigoberta Menchú following Monday&#8217;s sentencing of former Guatemalan police chief Pedro García Arredondo. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest government repression. One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, Rigoberta&#8217;s father. For years, Rigoberta has fought for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
Watch Part 1 of interview here
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. We&#8217;re continuing to talk about the former Guatemalan dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, who is now being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early &#39;80s. He was the president, the dictator, from 1982 to &#8217;83. At a trial in 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years, but the ruling was overturned less than two weeks later. Guatemala&#39;s highest court dismissed all the case&#8217;s proceedings in order to retrial on technical grounds, but human rights activists say the court caved to political pressure from Guatemala&#8217;s ruling elite. Since then, 88-year-old Ríos Montt has been under house arrest and earlier this month failed to attend a court hearing. It&#8217;s currently unclear when his retrial will resume.
We&#8217;re continuing our conversation with Nobel Peace Prize-winning laureate Rigoberta Menchú at her offices in Guatemala City, largely responsible for making sure Ríos Montt was brought to justice. She began the process more than a decade ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. And here in New York, filmmaker Pam Yates joins us, her most recent documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt.
So, we wanted to go back to Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. In the first part of this discussion, we talked about what happened in this trial and the trial of the police chief who was responsible for the massacre at the Spanish Embassy that killed Rigoberta&#8217;s father and 36 others. But we ended that conversation talking about larger responsibility, particularly at the level of the Guatemalan government and the U.S. government that backed it. Rigoberta Menchú, if you could continue with what you were saying?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] For years, the relevant documentation was hidden or erased and kept from public view. That documentation and those extensive dossiers are now before the courts and have been presented to the courts. A part of the massacre at the Spanish Embassy has been documented that six different police units participated and basically created a siege around the embassy so that nobody could leave the embassy alive. And similarly, in the course of the internal armed conflict, entire villages were wiped out, with the same intention that nobody would survive to tell the story.
AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your father and the work he was doing organizing peasants in the face of very harsh repression?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] My father was a natural-born leader. Since 1952, he organized and led peasants to struggle for land. He has really an amazing trajectory as a peasant leader. He helped to improve our seeds, to organize cooperatives, to improve the agricultural techniques that we used for planting. He did amazing things. He played a very important role in the history of the struggle of peasant farmers in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : What was the weapon you said was used that helped destroy the Spanish Embassy, that led to the death of your father and so many others?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, it has been presented and proved in court that there were two sources of fire in the Spanish Embassy. The first was started with an explosion and was where kerosene was probably used. The second source of incineration seems to be something that is quite unusual and extraordinary, given the speed at which it incinerated 37 people who were in the embassy at the time. The evidence points to this not being a regular burn time for a fire. The incineration burned the internal organs of the victims, their lungs and their kidneys. So it was not just a regular kind of fire. So, an apparatus has been photographed that was some kind of fire launcher that sprayed the bodies of the victims. The Spanish government has been documenting this and identifying the arm in question that was used.
AMY GOODMAN : Where do they believe it was from?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] I believe that the investigation determined that it was an Israeli-made weapon. It was carried by a person who had a direct and intimate relationship with Pedro García Arredondo. Pedro García Arredondo was giving orders at the time on the use of this weapon.
AMY GOODMAN : And he was the police chief who was found guilty and sentenced to 90 years in this trial.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] During the trial, a witness A, who is a witness whose name is protected, testified to the effect that this weapon was used and that it was manufactured in Israel.
AARON MATÉ: And, Pamela Yates, the significance of this revelation from the trial that an Israeli weapon was used in the Spanish Embassy fire, pointing to potential Israeli complicity?
PAMELA YATES : Doesn&#8217;t surprise me at all, because when the United States cut off military aid to Guatemala, they got their closest allies to step in: the Argentines and the Israelis. And thus we see a lot of Argentine and a lot of Israeli participation in the war, in the dirty war in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He&#8217;s being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. This is a clip of Judge Yassmin Barrios during the first genocide trial. This is from Pamela Yates&#8217;s web series, Dictator in the Dock .
JUDGE YASSMIN BARRIOS : [translated] In the Ixil area, in the villages and hamlets of Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul, there were violent deaths of human beings, rapes and the razing of villages, which forced the Maya Ixil to flee in order to save their lives. We judges make the following analysis: With regard to the crime of genocide, the expert report from Dr. Elizabeth Ann Oglesby, who explained that the objective was to eliminate the civil population because it was considered that the Ixil people were the base of the guerrilla support.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Judge Barrios. Now, this is very interesting, Pam Yates. At this trial, you had the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, and you had the judge, Judge Barrios—both are women. Talk about the significance of what the judge said. And then, what happened at the end of this trial?
PAMELA YATES : What was incredible was the sentencing of Ríos Montt. The sentencing is the day when you actually read the verdict and then decree the sentence. And she gave the whole narrative of what had happened in the trial, which is actually the story of what had happened in Guatemala. And at the end of it all, she said, &quot;We can never let this happen again. And the reason that we have these courts of justice is to put it all out on the table, strengthen our democracy and move forward. But he is guilty.&quot; So, the significance is just astounding. It means that a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people—first time ever in the world and the Americas—is found guilty of that genocide. This is huge.
You know, many of the genocides in the Americas happened a really long time ago. This one happened 30-odd years ago. So, that it can be brought to trial and that the victims and survivors never gave up on the quest for justice over 30 years also points to the resilience of the Guatemalan people. But it also means that they have to spend a lot of time and energy in these courts, that are not really geared to giving real justice. Let&#8217;s see what happens with the Pedro García Arredondo case and how that verdict holds. But at least we were able to have our day in court, to have the story told and to have the verdict read.
AMY GOODMAN : Rigoberta Menchú, we must end. Do you feel there is hope for your country of Guatemala now?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I do think that there&#8217;s hope for Guatemala. But this hope has a very high price. It&#8217;s a hope that is built by people who take tremendous risks. Many of the witnesses still don&#8217;t want to talk. Many of the victims don&#8217;t want to testify, and they&#8217;re afraid. And they&#8217;re afraid because they&#8217;re criminalized. The victims themselves are criminalized. They&#8217;re stigmatized. They suffer social rejection. There&#8217;s smear campaigns against us. We&#8217;re called liars and leftists and communists. And these words, these accusations, hit us emotionally. They hurt. And also, many of the victims are tired. They&#8217;re ill. Many of them are elders. So, justice is prevailing, but at a tremendous cost. And this justice continues to be painful. So, yes, this is a sign of hope for Guatemala, and it&#8217;s also a sign of hope for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, her father, Don Vicente Menchú, was killed in the 1980 Spanish Embassy massacre in which 37 Guatemalan peasants, activists were killed. She has published many books. Her autobiography is I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala . And thank you very much, Pamela Yates—
PAMELA YATES : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : —filmmaker who in 1983 did the film, When the Mountains Tremble . She also did the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt. And the clip we chose was from Dictator in the Dock , which is a web series?
PAMELA YATES : Twenty-three-episode web series, highlights of the Ríos Montt genocide trial, online.
AMY GOODMAN : At?
PAMELA YATES : Skylight.is .
AMY GOODMAN : And we will link to it at democracynow.org. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Special thanks to Cassandra Smithies. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsPt. 2: A Massacre in Guatemala: Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú on 1980 Fire That Killed Her Father Watch Part 2 of our conversation with Rigoberta Menchú following Monday&#8217;s sentencing of former Guatemalan police chief Pedro García Arredondo. He was sentenced to 90 years in prison for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest government repression. One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, Rigoberta&#8217;s father. For years, Rigoberta has fought for justice. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
Watch Part 1 of interview here
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. We&#8217;re continuing to talk about the former Guatemalan dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, who is now being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early &#39;80s. He was the president, the dictator, from 1982 to &#8217;83. At a trial in 2013, he was sentenced to 80 years, but the ruling was overturned less than two weeks later. Guatemala&#39;s highest court dismissed all the case&#8217;s proceedings in order to retrial on technical grounds, but human rights activists say the court caved to political pressure from Guatemala&#8217;s ruling elite. Since then, 88-year-old Ríos Montt has been under house arrest and earlier this month failed to attend a court hearing. It&#8217;s currently unclear when his retrial will resume.
We&#8217;re continuing our conversation with Nobel Peace Prize-winning laureate Rigoberta Menchú at her offices in Guatemala City, largely responsible for making sure Ríos Montt was brought to justice. She began the process more than a decade ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. And here in New York, filmmaker Pam Yates joins us, her most recent documentary, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt.
So, we wanted to go back to Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. In the first part of this discussion, we talked about what happened in this trial and the trial of the police chief who was responsible for the massacre at the Spanish Embassy that killed Rigoberta&#8217;s father and 36 others. But we ended that conversation talking about larger responsibility, particularly at the level of the Guatemalan government and the U.S. government that backed it. Rigoberta Menchú, if you could continue with what you were saying?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] For years, the relevant documentation was hidden or erased and kept from public view. That documentation and those extensive dossiers are now before the courts and have been presented to the courts. A part of the massacre at the Spanish Embassy has been documented that six different police units participated and basically created a siege around the embassy so that nobody could leave the embassy alive. And similarly, in the course of the internal armed conflict, entire villages were wiped out, with the same intention that nobody would survive to tell the story.
AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your father and the work he was doing organizing peasants in the face of very harsh repression?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] My father was a natural-born leader. Since 1952, he organized and led peasants to struggle for land. He has really an amazing trajectory as a peasant leader. He helped to improve our seeds, to organize cooperatives, to improve the agricultural techniques that we used for planting. He did amazing things. He played a very important role in the history of the struggle of peasant farmers in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : What was the weapon you said was used that helped destroy the Spanish Embassy, that led to the death of your father and so many others?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, it has been presented and proved in court that there were two sources of fire in the Spanish Embassy. The first was started with an explosion and was where kerosene was probably used. The second source of incineration seems to be something that is quite unusual and extraordinary, given the speed at which it incinerated 37 people who were in the embassy at the time. The evidence points to this not being a regular burn time for a fire. The incineration burned the internal organs of the victims, their lungs and their kidneys. So it was not just a regular kind of fire. So, an apparatus has been photographed that was some kind of fire launcher that sprayed the bodies of the victims. The Spanish government has been documenting this and identifying the arm in question that was used.
AMY GOODMAN : Where do they believe it was from?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] I believe that the investigation determined that it was an Israeli-made weapon. It was carried by a person who had a direct and intimate relationship with Pedro García Arredondo. Pedro García Arredondo was giving orders at the time on the use of this weapon.
AMY GOODMAN : And he was the police chief who was found guilty and sentenced to 90 years in this trial.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] During the trial, a witness A, who is a witness whose name is protected, testified to the effect that this weapon was used and that it was manufactured in Israel.
AARON MATÉ: And, Pamela Yates, the significance of this revelation from the trial that an Israeli weapon was used in the Spanish Embassy fire, pointing to potential Israeli complicity?
PAMELA YATES : Doesn&#8217;t surprise me at all, because when the United States cut off military aid to Guatemala, they got their closest allies to step in: the Argentines and the Israelis. And thus we see a lot of Argentine and a lot of Israeli participation in the war, in the dirty war in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go back to the trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He&#8217;s being tried for a second time on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. This is a clip of Judge Yassmin Barrios during the first genocide trial. This is from Pamela Yates&#8217;s web series, Dictator in the Dock .
JUDGE YASSMIN BARRIOS : [translated] In the Ixil area, in the villages and hamlets of Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul, there were violent deaths of human beings, rapes and the razing of villages, which forced the Maya Ixil to flee in order to save their lives. We judges make the following analysis: With regard to the crime of genocide, the expert report from Dr. Elizabeth Ann Oglesby, who explained that the objective was to eliminate the civil population because it was considered that the Ixil people were the base of the guerrilla support.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Judge Barrios. Now, this is very interesting, Pam Yates. At this trial, you had the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, and you had the judge, Judge Barrios—both are women. Talk about the significance of what the judge said. And then, what happened at the end of this trial?
PAMELA YATES : What was incredible was the sentencing of Ríos Montt. The sentencing is the day when you actually read the verdict and then decree the sentence. And she gave the whole narrative of what had happened in the trial, which is actually the story of what had happened in Guatemala. And at the end of it all, she said, &quot;We can never let this happen again. And the reason that we have these courts of justice is to put it all out on the table, strengthen our democracy and move forward. But he is guilty.&quot; So, the significance is just astounding. It means that a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people—first time ever in the world and the Americas—is found guilty of that genocide. This is huge.
You know, many of the genocides in the Americas happened a really long time ago. This one happened 30-odd years ago. So, that it can be brought to trial and that the victims and survivors never gave up on the quest for justice over 30 years also points to the resilience of the Guatemalan people. But it also means that they have to spend a lot of time and energy in these courts, that are not really geared to giving real justice. Let&#8217;s see what happens with the Pedro García Arredondo case and how that verdict holds. But at least we were able to have our day in court, to have the story told and to have the verdict read.
AMY GOODMAN : Rigoberta Menchú, we must end. Do you feel there is hope for your country of Guatemala now?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I do think that there&#8217;s hope for Guatemala. But this hope has a very high price. It&#8217;s a hope that is built by people who take tremendous risks. Many of the witnesses still don&#8217;t want to talk. Many of the victims don&#8217;t want to testify, and they&#8217;re afraid. And they&#8217;re afraid because they&#8217;re criminalized. The victims themselves are criminalized. They&#8217;re stigmatized. They suffer social rejection. There&#8217;s smear campaigns against us. We&#8217;re called liars and leftists and communists. And these words, these accusations, hit us emotionally. They hurt. And also, many of the victims are tired. They&#8217;re ill. Many of them are elders. So, justice is prevailing, but at a tremendous cost. And this justice continues to be painful. So, yes, this is a sign of hope for Guatemala, and it&#8217;s also a sign of hope for the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, her father, Don Vicente Menchú, was killed in the 1980 Spanish Embassy massacre in which 37 Guatemalan peasants, activists were killed. She has published many books. Her autobiography is I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala . And thank you very much, Pamela Yates—
PAMELA YATES : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : —filmmaker who in 1983 did the film, When the Mountains Tremble . She also did the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , about building the genocide case against General Efraín Ríos Montt. And the clip we chose was from Dictator in the Dock , which is a web series?
PAMELA YATES : Twenty-three-episode web series, highlights of the Ríos Montt genocide trial, online.
AMY GOODMAN : At?
PAMELA YATES : Skylight.is .
AMY GOODMAN : And we will link to it at democracynow.org. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. Special thanks to Cassandra Smithies. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsProsecuting Guatemala's Dirty War: Rigoberta Menchú Hails Embassy Fire Verdict, Dictator's Trialhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/20/prosecuting_guatemalas_dirty_war_rigoberta_menchu
tag:democracynow.org,2015-01-20:en/story/98ad1a AARON MATÉ: In a major victory for human rights activists, a Guatemalan court has returned a guilty verdict in the Spanish Embassy massacre of 1980. On Monday, the court found former police chief Pedro García Arredondo responsible for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest the government. Judge María Eugenia Castellanos delivered the verdict.
JUDGE MARÍA EUGENIA CASTELLANOS : [translated] This court unanimously declares, first, that the defendant, Pedro García Arredondo, is the perpetrator responsible for the crimes of murder.
AMY GOODMAN : According to Monday&#8217;s ruling, Arredondo was the officer who gave the order to set fire to the diplomatic mission, burning the activists to death. He was also found guilty of two separate murders and sentenced to a total of 90 years in prison.
One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, an indigenous peasant leader and father of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. In a moment, Rigoberta Menchú will join us live from Guatemala City to discuss this historic verdict—over three decades in the making. But first, let&#8217;s go back to a clip of the 1983 documentary When the Mountains Tremble . In the film, Menchú looks directly into the camera and explains why her father and other peasant activists occupied the Spanish Embassy January 31st, 1980.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] The security forces arrived in our village to throw us off our plot. According to them, it belonged to a nearby landowner. We were very scared, since we didn&#8217;t speak Spanish and couldn&#8217;t understand them. They destroyed what little we had. So the people started defending themselves. But no one would listen to us, neither the government nor the mass media. That&#8217;s why my father got together with many others in the capital, and they decided to take over the Spanish Embassy to let the world know what was happening to us. The rest is history.
AARON MATÉ: That was Rigoberta Menchu in the 1983 documentary, When the Mountains Tremble . Just two people survived the embassy fire. One of them was Spanish Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López. The other was a Guatemalan farmer named Gregorio Yujá. He was subsequently disappeared and his body found with evidence of torture three days after the fire. During the Guatemalan dirty war, more than 200,000 people died—83 percent of them were indigenous Mayans.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, for more, we&#8217;re joined now by Democracy Now! video stream from Guatemala City by Rigoberta Menchú. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. She has published many books, including I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala . She&#8217;s been translated into over a dozen languages, awarded more than 30 honorary degrees, runs the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation.
Here in New York, we&#8217;re joined by Pamela Yates, a partner at Skylight Pictures, a documentary film and digital media company that focuses on human rights and social justice stories. In 1983, she collaborated with Rigoberta Menchú in that documentary, When the Mountains Tremble .
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let&#8217;s go directly first to Guatemala City. Rigoberta Menchú, you were in the courtroom when the verdict and sentence were handed down. Can you describe your reaction?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Well, undoubtedly, this is a historic event. This trial and verdict are huge. We waited 16 years for this verdict to be handed down. The trial went on for 16 years. And this verdict has been issued 36 years after the event itself. So we are deeply moved, and this is a very special moment in our history.
AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your long quest for justice, almost four decades in the making?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Well, first of all, I left Guatemala and fled. I was forced into exile. And I promised myself and I promised my father and I promised the memory of Guatemala and the victims of Guatemala that I would not cease fighting against impunity. And that&#8217;s precisely what I have done. Year in and year out, every day of my life, I have dedicated myself to gathering the evidence and putting together the cases to fight for this truth.
I think that it&#8217;s very important, and what&#8217;s really crucial here is the memory of the victims and the search for the truth, and also the commitment to substantiate the truth. So the truth is foremost, because they accused us of being liars. They tried to denigrate the memory of the victims. They even said that the victims had burned themselves. But the truth has come forward with this verdict from the court that holds not just García Arredondo responsible, but holds the state of Guatemala responsible for this massacre.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s go to that issue of the state, because in the same courthouse, General Ríos Montt is on trial, though that trial has been delayed. Can you talk about the significance of what he has done?
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes. There are two guilty verdicts that have been issued in this courthouse: first, the guilty verdict for the Spanish Embassy massacre, and secondly, the guilty conviction of Ríos Montt. In both cases, we are seeing that there are significant legal challenges. The constitutional court has declared the case against Ríos Montt as not—has been annulled. But these are illegal arguments. They are breaking with due process. And so, both cases face significant legal challenges and hurdles to stick.
AMY GOODMAN : Pam Yates, if you could tell us further about what&#8217;s happening with Ríos Montt right now, the man who was president from &#39;82 to &#8217;83, what he was convicted of, why he&#39;s back in trial, and, as we wrap up, how this implicates—or does it?—the current president of Guatemala, Pérez Molina, and the role of the United States?
PAMELA YATES : That&#8217;s a lot, Amy. And buenos días , Rigoberta. The case against Ríos Montt, he is being retried on the same charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But his lawyers&#8217; strategy is to delay and deny—delay so that he will never go to prison. He&#8217;s 88 years old; they hope he will die before that. But isn&#8217;t it incredible that the people of Guatemala now have successfully adjudicated these two cases? One for genocide, the first ever of a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people in the Americas—never happened before.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Ríos Montt.
PAMELA YATES : That was Ríos Montt. And now the—
AMY GOODMAN : The verdict set aside?
PAMELA YATES : The verdict was set aside, but for so many people in Guatemala, the verdict is valid. And, you know, the quest for justice is justice. So the fact that people came into the courtroom and spoke for two months about what had actually happened in Guatemala, in both the Ríos Montt genocide case and the Pedro García Arredondo case, the burning of the Spanish Embassy, really contributes to the historical narrative and setting the record straight about what happened in Guatemala, so everyone knows what actually happened and no one is afraid to talk about it.
AARON MATÉ: And the U.S. role?
PAMELA YATES : The U.S. role—well, the U.S. was totally complicit in the genocide in Guatemala. And we now have the documentation to prove it. When Ríos Montt was being tried for genocide, the Ministerio Público, the Public Ministry, like the Attorney General&#8217;s Office, had a very narrow focus on one particular region and one particular group of ethnic Maya, the Maya Ixil. But many other things were happening, and many other areas really need to be explored—the role of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala; the role of the United States. And I&#8217;m hoping now that the conviction in the Spanish Embassy case will increase the momentum for this justice initiative to continue. More people have been tried, arrested, convicted of crimes that happened during the war in Guatemala in the last four years than in the previous 30 years. And I think the international community has to support that initiative.
AMY GOODMAN : Rigoberta Menchú, as we wrap up, do you hold the United States responsible, in addition to your own government at the time, the Guatemalan government and military? We only have 15 seconds.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I totally concur. There is a great deal of documentation that has been compiled, part of it related to the Cold War. And, in fact, the weapon that was used to incinerate the Spanish Embassy and to burn those that occupied it is also of a dubious source that is being looked into and documented. So, in conclusion, I do hold not only the state of Guatemala responsible, but—
AMY GOODMAN : We have to leave it there. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté. AARON MATÉ: In a major victory for human rights activists, a Guatemalan court has returned a guilty verdict in the Spanish Embassy massacre of 1980. On Monday, the court found former police chief Pedro García Arredondo responsible for ordering an attack on 37 peasant activists and student organizers who were occupying the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to protest the government. Judge María Eugenia Castellanos delivered the verdict.

JUDGE MARÍA EUGENIACASTELLANOS: [translated] This court unanimously declares, first, that the defendant, Pedro García Arredondo, is the perpetrator responsible for the crimes of murder.

AMYGOODMAN: According to Monday’s ruling, Arredondo was the officer who gave the order to set fire to the diplomatic mission, burning the activists to death. He was also found guilty of two separate murders and sentenced to a total of 90 years in prison.

One of the victims of the Spanish Embassy massacre was Don Vicente Menchú, an indigenous peasant leader and father of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. In a moment, Rigoberta Menchú will join us live from Guatemala City to discuss this historic verdict—over three decades in the making. But first, let’s go back to a clip of the 1983 documentary When the Mountains Tremble. In the film, Menchú looks directly into the camera and explains why her father and other peasant activists occupied the Spanish Embassy January 31st, 1980.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] The security forces arrived in our village to throw us off our plot. According to them, it belonged to a nearby landowner. We were very scared, since we didn’t speak Spanish and couldn’t understand them. They destroyed what little we had. So the people started defending themselves. But no one would listen to us, neither the government nor the mass media. That’s why my father got together with many others in the capital, and they decided to take over the Spanish Embassy to let the world know what was happening to us. The rest is history.

AARON MATÉ: That was Rigoberta Menchu in the 1983 documentary, When the Mountains Tremble. Just two people survived the embassy fire. One of them was Spanish Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López. The other was a Guatemalan farmer named Gregorio Yujá. He was subsequently disappeared and his body found with evidence of torture three days after the fire. During the Guatemalan dirty war, more than 200,000 people died—83 percent of them were indigenous Mayans.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, for more, we’re joined now by Democracy Now! video stream from Guatemala City by Rigoberta Menchú. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. She has published many books, including I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. She’s been translated into over a dozen languages, awarded more than 30 honorary degrees, runs the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation.

Here in New York, we’re joined by Pamela Yates, a partner at Skylight Pictures, a documentary film and digital media company that focuses on human rights and social justice stories. In 1983, she collaborated with Rigoberta Menchú in that documentary, When the Mountains Tremble.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s go directly first to Guatemala City. Rigoberta Menchú, you were in the courtroom when the verdict and sentence were handed down. Can you describe your reaction?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Well, undoubtedly, this is a historic event. This trial and verdict are huge. We waited 16 years for this verdict to be handed down. The trial went on for 16 years. And this verdict has been issued 36 years after the event itself. So we are deeply moved, and this is a very special moment in our history.

AARON MATÉ: Can you talk about your long quest for justice, almost four decades in the making?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Well, first of all, I left Guatemala and fled. I was forced into exile. And I promised myself and I promised my father and I promised the memory of Guatemala and the victims of Guatemala that I would not cease fighting against impunity. And that’s precisely what I have done. Year in and year out, every day of my life, I have dedicated myself to gathering the evidence and putting together the cases to fight for this truth.

I think that it’s very important, and what’s really crucial here is the memory of the victims and the search for the truth, and also the commitment to substantiate the truth. So the truth is foremost, because they accused us of being liars. They tried to denigrate the memory of the victims. They even said that the victims had burned themselves. But the truth has come forward with this verdict from the court that holds not just García Arredondo responsible, but holds the state of Guatemala responsible for this massacre.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s go to that issue of the state, because in the same courthouse, General Ríos Montt is on trial, though that trial has been delayed. Can you talk about the significance of what he has done?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes. There are two guilty verdicts that have been issued in this courthouse: first, the guilty verdict for the Spanish Embassy massacre, and secondly, the guilty conviction of Ríos Montt. In both cases, we are seeing that there are significant legal challenges. The constitutional court has declared the case against Ríos Montt as not—has been annulled. But these are illegal arguments. They are breaking with due process. And so, both cases face significant legal challenges and hurdles to stick.

AMYGOODMAN: Pam Yates, if you could tell us further about what’s happening with Ríos Montt right now, the man who was president from '82 to ’83, what he was convicted of, why he's back in trial, and, as we wrap up, how this implicates—or does it?—the current president of Guatemala, Pérez Molina, and the role of the United States?

PAMELAYATES: That’s a lot, Amy. And buenos días, Rigoberta. The case against Ríos Montt, he is being retried on the same charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But his lawyers’ strategy is to delay and deny—delay so that he will never go to prison. He’s 88 years old; they hope he will die before that. But isn’t it incredible that the people of Guatemala now have successfully adjudicated these two cases? One for genocide, the first ever of a perpetrator of genocide against indigenous people in the Americas—never happened before.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Ríos Montt.

PAMELAYATES: That was Ríos Montt. And now the—

AMYGOODMAN: The verdict set aside?

PAMELAYATES: The verdict was set aside, but for so many people in Guatemala, the verdict is valid. And, you know, the quest for justice is justice. So the fact that people came into the courtroom and spoke for two months about what had actually happened in Guatemala, in both the Ríos Montt genocide case and the Pedro García Arredondo case, the burning of the Spanish Embassy, really contributes to the historical narrative and setting the record straight about what happened in Guatemala, so everyone knows what actually happened and no one is afraid to talk about it.

AARON MATÉ: And the U.S. role?

PAMELAYATES: The U.S. role—well, the U.S. was totally complicit in the genocide in Guatemala. And we now have the documentation to prove it. When Ríos Montt was being tried for genocide, the Ministerio Público, the Public Ministry, like the Attorney General’s Office, had a very narrow focus on one particular region and one particular group of ethnic Maya, the Maya Ixil. But many other things were happening, and many other areas really need to be explored—the role of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala; the role of the United States. And I’m hoping now that the conviction in the Spanish Embassy case will increase the momentum for this justice initiative to continue. More people have been tried, arrested, convicted of crimes that happened during the war in Guatemala in the last four years than in the previous 30 years. And I think the international community has to support that initiative.

AMYGOODMAN: Rigoberta Menchú, as we wrap up, do you hold the United States responsible, in addition to your own government at the time, the Guatemalan government and military? We only have 15 seconds.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes, I totally concur. There is a great deal of documentation that has been compiled, part of it related to the Cold War. And, in fact, the weapon that was used to incinerate the Spanish Embassy and to burn those that occupied it is also of a dubious source that is being looked into and documented. So, in conclusion, I do hold not only the state of Guatemala responsible, but—

AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I’m Amy Goodman, with Aaron Maté.

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Tue, 20 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500Two Detention Centers for Migrant Women And Children Open On 5th Anniv. of End to Family Detentionhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/8/8/two_detention_centers_for_migrant_women
tag:democracynow.org,2014-08-08:blog/4a5b94 Five years ago immigration advocates praised the Obama administration for closing down the only large-scale detention center for immigrant women and children. Now, in response to the surge of Central American migrants caught at the border after seeking asylum, it has quietly opened two new family detention facilities that have more than 1,200 beds, and cribs.
While unaccompanied migrant children have largely been placed with family members already in the country, those who were stopped at the border with their mothers are being treated differently.
Democracy Now! has documented how more than 650 women and children, some as young as 18 months old, have been sent to an isolated detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. Watch the video above to see Democracy Now! producer Renee Feltz report on the poor conditions and lack of due process there, and the lawyers mobilizing to assist them. This week the first detainee in Artesia was granted bond as her asylum claim is processed, but it was set at $25,000, an unusually high sum since studies show refugees almost always show up to their asylum hearings.
In August, hundreds more kids and their mothers began to be transferred to a detention center in Karnes City, Texas, which is run by the private prison company, Geo Group, and has another 600 beds which used to hold male prisoners.
All of this comes as immigration advocates had been planning to mark the fifth anniversary of the end of family detention. It was August 2009 when Obama closed down the only other large detention center that held women and children&ndash;the &quot;T. Don Hutto facility in Texas, run by Corrections Corporation of America, where the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue to improve conditions, saying toddlers in prison uniforms spent most of the day locked in their cells. Since then, the only other place that held toddlers or babies still nursing had been the Berks Family Residential Service in Leesport, Pennsylvania, which has 85 beds.
Obama&#8217;s repatriation policy is reflected in his $3.7 billion emergency supplemental request, which includes $879 million for 6,350 more beds for detained families, at about $120/day per bed. It would also open 23,000 daily slots for alternatives to detention. Geo Group stands to profit from this as well, since its subsidiary Bi Incorporated has the main contract to provide electronic monitoring bracelets that track immigrants with cases still being processed.
Meanwhile a New York based company has proposed building a 3,500 bed warehouse for unaccompanied migrant children in Clint, Texas. It would be called the &quot;Abraham Lincoln Transitional Lodge,&quot; according to the company&#8217;s application. The town itself has 926 residents according to the 2010 census. The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing the proposal.
Five years ago immigration advocates praised the Obama administration for closing down the only large-scale detention center for immigrant women and children. Now, in response to the surge of Central American migrants caught at the border after seeking asylum, it has quietly opened two new family detention facilities that have more than 1,200 beds, and cribs.

While unaccompanied migrant children have largely been placed with family members already in the country, those who were stopped at the border with their mothers are being treated differently.

Democracy Now! has documented how more than 650 women and children, some as young as 18 months old, have been sent to an isolated detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. Watch the video above to see Democracy Now! producer Renee Feltz report on the poor conditions and lack of due process there, and the lawyers mobilizing to assist them. This week the first detainee in Artesia was granted bond as her asylum claim is processed, but it was set at $25,000, an unusually high sum since studies show refugees almost always show up to their asylum hearings.

In August, hundreds more kids and their mothers began to be transferred to a detention center in Karnes City, Texas, which is run by the private prison company, Geo Group, and has another 600 beds which used to hold male prisoners.

All of this comes as immigration advocates had been planning to mark the fifth anniversary of the end of family detention. It was August 2009 when Obama closed down the only other large detention center that held women and children–the "T. Don Hutto facility in Texas, run by Corrections Corporation of America, where the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue to improve conditions, saying toddlers in prison uniforms spent most of the day locked in their cells. Since then, the only other place that held toddlers or babies still nursing had been the Berks Family Residential Service in Leesport, Pennsylvania, which has 85 beds.

Obama’s repatriation policy is reflected in his $3.7 billion emergency supplemental request, which includes $879 million for 6,350 more beds for detained families, at about $120/day per bed. It would also open 23,000 daily slots for alternatives to detention. Geo Group stands to profit from this as well, since its subsidiary Bi Incorporated has the main contract to provide electronic monitoring bracelets that track immigrants with cases still being processed.

Meanwhile a New York based company has proposed building a 3,500 bed warehouse for unaccompanied migrant children in Clint, Texas. It would be called the "Abraham Lincoln Transitional Lodge," according to the company’s application. The town itself has 926 residents according to the 2010 census. The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing the proposal.

]]>
Fri, 08 Aug 2014 16:56:00 -0400Two Detention Centers for Migrant Women And Children Open On 5th Anniv. of End to Family Detention Five years ago immigration advocates praised the Obama administration for closing down the only large-scale detention center for immigrant women and children. Now, in response to the surge of Central American migrants caught at the border after seeking asylum, it has quietly opened two new family detention facilities that have more than 1,200 beds, and cribs.
While unaccompanied migrant children have largely been placed with family members already in the country, those who were stopped at the border with their mothers are being treated differently.
Democracy Now! has documented how more than 650 women and children, some as young as 18 months old, have been sent to an isolated detention center in Artesia, New Mexico. Watch the video above to see Democracy Now! producer Renee Feltz report on the poor conditions and lack of due process there, and the lawyers mobilizing to assist them. This week the first detainee in Artesia was granted bond as her asylum claim is processed, but it was set at $25,000, an unusually high sum since studies show refugees almost always show up to their asylum hearings.
In August, hundreds more kids and their mothers began to be transferred to a detention center in Karnes City, Texas, which is run by the private prison company, Geo Group, and has another 600 beds which used to hold male prisoners.
All of this comes as immigration advocates had been planning to mark the fifth anniversary of the end of family detention. It was August 2009 when Obama closed down the only other large detention center that held women and children&ndash;the &quot;T. Don Hutto facility in Texas, run by Corrections Corporation of America, where the American Civil Liberties Union had to sue to improve conditions, saying toddlers in prison uniforms spent most of the day locked in their cells. Since then, the only other place that held toddlers or babies still nursing had been the Berks Family Residential Service in Leesport, Pennsylvania, which has 85 beds.
Obama&#8217;s repatriation policy is reflected in his $3.7 billion emergency supplemental request, which includes $879 million for 6,350 more beds for detained families, at about $120/day per bed. It would also open 23,000 daily slots for alternatives to detention. Geo Group stands to profit from this as well, since its subsidiary Bi Incorporated has the main contract to provide electronic monitoring bracelets that track immigrants with cases still being processed.
Meanwhile a New York based company has proposed building a 3,500 bed warehouse for unaccompanied migrant children in Clint, Texas. It would be called the &quot;Abraham Lincoln Transitional Lodge,&quot; according to the company&#8217;s application. The town itself has 926 residents according to the 2010 census. The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing the proposal. nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!NewsU.S. Turns Back on Child Migrants After Its Policies in Guatemala, Honduras Sowed Seeds of Crisishttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/17/us_turns_back_on_child_migrants
tag:democracynow.org,2014-07-17:en/story/85a820 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This week saw the first planeload of children deported to Honduras since President Obama vowed to speed up the removal of more than 57,000 youths who&#8217;ve fled to the United States from Central America in recent months. The group of 38 deportees included 21 children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, along with 17 female family members.
Among them was Victoria Cordova, who came to the United States with her nine-year-old daughter. They were captured at the U.S.-Mexico border after a 25-day journey and are now back in San Pedro Sula, the city with the highest murder rate in the world. Last month, children in Honduras were murdered at a rate of more than one per day. Cordova described her ordeal to reporters.
VICTORIA CORDOVA : [translated] I don&#8217;t have any work. It&#8217;s been four months without work. This is a part of what motivated me to go—the poverty, the situation here, this insecurity we live through. We see children nearby who are very young, 12 and 13 years old, and they drug themselves. It&#8217;s terrible to live like this. Here we live a life where you can&#8217;t even call the police, because they are controlled by the gangs.
When we crossed the river and they trapped us, we didn&#8217;t think. We had some hope. And then, when we arrived in McAllen, we were on the floor. There was dust. There were a lot of people there, and I was there for various hours. They call it an ice box, because it&#8217;s very cold there. We were there for two days. They took us to El Paso, Texas, on a plane, and there in El Paso, Texas, we spent two days there sleeping on the ground, cold.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Tuesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the experience of Cordova and others should demonstrate to Central Americans that, quote, &quot;they will not be welcomed to this country with open arms.&quot;
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Honduran officials called for an increase in U.S. aid to Central America. Honduran Foreign Minister Mireya Agüero called for a, quote, &quot;mini-Marshall Plan,&quot; similar to the U.S. anti-drug programs in Colombia and Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN : In fact, U.S. funding and foreign policy has long shaped the lives of Central Americans. June 28th marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup that deposed the democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, which the U.S did not oppose. Our next guest argues it was the coup, more than drug trafficking and gangs, that opened the doors to the violence in Honduras and unleashed an ongoing wave of state-sponsored repression.
We&#8217;re joined right now by Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an expert on human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras. She recently authored a piece titled &quot;Who&#8217;s Responsible for the Flight of Honduran Children?&quot; And in February, her article , &quot;The Thugocracy Next Door,&quot; appeared in Politico magazine.
Dana Frank, welcome to Democracy Now!
DANA FRANK : Thanks a lot.
AMY GOODMAN : Thank you for joining us from the Stanford University studios. Explain what the background is for so many—and so many children—to be fleeing the violence in Honduras.
DANA FRANK : Yeah, I think, you know, we keep hearing the fact that people are fleeing gangs and violence, but there hasn&#8217;t been an analysis or discussion of why is there so much gang activity and violence in Honduras. And the answer is this tremendous criminality that the 2009 military coup opened the door to when it overthrew the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. The coup, of course, itself was a criminal act, and it really opened the door for this spectacular corruption of the police and up-and-down, top-to-bottom of the government. And that, in turn, means it&#8217;s possible to kill anybody you want, practically, and nothing will happen to you. It&#8217;s widely documented that the police are overwhelmingly corrupt. Even a government official charged with cleaning up the police admitted last fall that 70 percent of the Honduran police are beyond saving. And you heard the woman, Ms. Cordova, say that the police themselves are tied in with organized crime and drug traffickers. So, when we talk about this violence, it&#8217;s really important to understand there&#8217;s almost no functioning criminal justice system and no political will at the top to do anything about this.
The president, the new president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who came into power in January, himself was a major backer of the criminal coup when he was the president—was head of a key committee in the Honduran Congress at the time, and a year and a half ago, as president of the Honduran Congress, illegally overthrew part of the Supreme Court, and he illegally was part of naming a new attorney general loyal to him last summer, named to an illegal five-year term. And he&#8217;s built his campaign not around cleaning up the police, but a new military police that is expanding this militarization of Honduran society, and that military police itself is committing serious human rights abuses, including, recently in May, beating up and jailing the most prominent advocate for children in Honduras.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dana Frank, I remember being in San Pedro Sula back in the early 1990s. I mean, not only was the level of corruption incredibly high among the police forces, but there were—the military was out in the streets constantly patrolling. It&#8217;s also one of the poorest countries in all of the Americas. You&#8217;ve also referred to the impact of the CAFTA deal on Honduras and on the poverty of the country.
DANA FRANK : Oh, yeah, certainly, it&#8217;s not like there was ever a golden age in Honduras. But, you know, as Senator Tim Kaine said in a hearing for the new ambassador of Honduras, that Hondurans are saying that the level of militarization, as well—he said the level of military repression and terror there is worse than it was in the early 1980s at the height of the U.S.-funded Contra war in Nicaragua that Honduras was the base for. So we need to talk about, relatively, this is even more terrifying than then, which is really saying a lot.
Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it&#8217;s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn&#8217;t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that&#8217;s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.
So, with this poverty that we&#8217;re seeing that people are fleeing, it&#8217;s not like people are like, &quot;Let&#8217;s go have the American dream.&quot; There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we&#8217;re talking about starving to death—that&#8217;s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it&#8217;s a very, very tragic situation here. But it&#8217;s not like it tragically just happened. It&#8217;s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Frank, I wanted to go to this issue of U.S. responsibility and turn to former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya , who was ousted five years ago. We got a chance to sit down with him in 2011 at his home in Tegucigalpa. I had just flown in with him. This was after the coup when a new president was chosen. And his family flew back from Nicaragua to Honduras. It was the first time that he was at his home for several years.
MANUEL ZELAYA : [translated] The U.S. State Department has always denied, and they continue to deny, any ties with the coup d&#8217;état. Nevertheless, all of the proof incriminates the U.S. government. And all of the actions that were taken by the de facto regime, or the golpista regime, which are those who carried out the coup, and it is to make favor of the industrial policies and the military policies and the financial policies of the United States in Honduras.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Professor Dana Frank, he strongly felt that the U.S. was involved with the coup. What evidence is there for that?
DANA FRANK : Well, the biggest evidence we have is that his plane stopped at the air force base at Palmerola, known as Soto Cano Air Force Base now, which is a joint U.S. and Honduran base. That plane could not have stopped there without U.S. permission. We don&#8217;t have the big smoking guns. We certainly have the behavior of the U.S. State Department and the White House after the coup, which was to legitimate the coup government as an equal partner to Zelaya—in fact, as a superior partner. They never denounced the spectacular repression after the coup. And they treated Zelaya like a bad child for trying to return to his own country. They recognized—they announced that they would recognize the outcome of the illegitimate November elections after that, even before the votes were counted. And it was clearly they wanted the whole situation to go away.
I mean, they clearly—Zelaya was, in many ways, the weakest domino of all the center-left and left governments that had come to power in Latin America in the previous 15 years. And it was a message to all those other governments that we will back coups, and we will overthrow you, as well. The U.S. then supported President Lobo, the outcome of that November 2009 election, and made up this fiction that it was a government of national reconciliation, and, ever since, has been turning a blind eye, for the most part, to the spectacular human rights abuses, including killings by state security forces and really spectacular lack of political will to deal with corruption at the very top of the government. And the U.S. keeps acting like this is just a hunky-dory government that we should be working with as a partner.
You know, I found it tremendously chilling to be reading newspaper reports and media reports of that planeload of children that came back to Honduras and the U.S. working with the Honduran government, welcoming those children with open arms, when the government itself is countenancing this problem. The government itself, you know, beat—has countenanced the beating up of the leading independent children&#8217;s activist in the country. The government itself doesn&#8217;t have the political will to clean up the police. So, what does it mean that we&#8217;re working with this partner to help these Honduran children?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We&#8217;re also joined by Jennifer Harbury, a human rights activist and lawyer based in Weslaco, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla commander, disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. She&#8217;s the author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala and has spent decades pressing for declassified information on her husband&#8217;s case.
Welcome, Jennifer Harbury.
JENNIFER HARBURY : Thank you very much. I&#8217;m glad to be with you.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talk to us about the—as we&#8217;ve been discussing Honduras, many of the children are also coming from Guatemala. And again, some of that history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala, especially in recent years.
JENNIFER HARBURY : Yes. We&#8217;ve been horrified by the thought of sending any of these children back, since, by international and domestic law, they qualify as refugees, almost all of them.
I can certainly talk about the Guatemalan counterpart to what Dana was just discussing. We talk sometimes about maybe the solution is to send more funding—as she was saying, a new Marshall Plan—to Central American countries. But that&#8217;s in fact going to pour gasoline on the fire, especially in Guatemala, where a number of former and current top officials in the military are in fact the drug lords. Some of them have left the military; some are still in. They got involved in the drug trade while the wars were going on and they had airstrips that were valuable to the Colombian drug lords. They became very wealthy that way and now have what are called parallel structures. And they organize, arm and train the gangs themselves to do their dirty work.
For example, the Zeta cartel that terrorize the border strip where I live now, which is almost down to Brownsville—I&#8217;m 10 miles from the Rio Grande—the Zetas are one of the most feared cartels anywhere, totally brutal. They were armed, trained and organized by the Guatemalan military special forces, called the Kaibiles, who, of course, in turn, were armed, trained, organized, etc., by the United States intelligence networks, and trained many of them at the School of the Americas. Another example is Julio Roberto Alpirez, a colonel, one of many high-level military officials, who is on the DEA corrupt officer list, but because he also worked as a paid CIA informant, no one has ever been able to go after him. So, much like Honduras, we have one of the highest murder rates in the world. The femicide rate is something like 10 times higher than that in Juárez.
As these refugees pour into the United States, we&#8217;re taking all kinds of measures to justify sending them back and claiming they&#8217;re not refugees. But the way we&#8217;re doing that is to expedite or rush them through proceedings so quickly that they can&#8217;t really tell their stories. And, of course, they have no legal advice. And basically turns on whether or not a 10-year-old child, when confronted with a Border Patrol agent, or young mother confronted with a Border Patrol agent, is able and willing to say, &quot;I&#8217;m asking for political asylum. I&#8217;m in danger of persecution or abuse at the hands of the drug lords and the gangs.&quot; And all of those people know, if they ever say those words, they&#8217;re going to be dead when they go back home. It&#8217;s the death penalty to squeal, basically, on the gangs and the drug lords in any way. So, without a lawyer, within days, they&#8217;re going to be headed home under expedited proceedings.
And this is a violation of international law and also U.S. domestic law. If they qualify for asylum or treatment under the Convention Against Torture, if they&#8217;re in danger of being harmed in this way by people who either are government officials or who are acting without the local governments being able or &quot;willing,&quot; quote-unquote, to protect the population, then these people are refugees. They cannot be sent back. And sweeping them under the rug and getting them out of the country so fast that they can&#8217;t tell their stories or get any legal advice is a double violation of humanitarian law, and it&#8217;s something we&#8217;re going to be answering for for a long time. We&#8217;re certainly not proud of having turned back the boatload of Jews to Nazi Germany, but at least we didn&#8217;t sail out on the high seas, board the ships and throw people overboard. These are children. These are refugees. We have to let them in.
There are many kinds of programs that we can put into action that would deal with the situation well, in the same way we&#8217;ve done before. We can do deferred action, deferred enforcement, temporary protected status. We&#8217;ve done those things for Honduras and Haiti. It would let people stay for a year or two and then have the danger in their homelands reconsidered. Meanwhile, they can work and support themselves. It would relieve the backup in the court. There&#8217;s many alternatives. We&#8217;re choosing to pretend that they&#8217;re not refugees, and send them home in violation of the law.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there, but we thank you both very much for being with us. We&#8217;ll link to both of your work.
Jennifer Harbury, human rights activist and lawyer, we&#8217;re speaking to her right near the border in Weslaco, Texas, near the Mexico border. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla commander, disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. He was tortured. He was murdered. And those involved with his killing were trained by the United States, and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency.
Dana Frank, we thank you for being with us from Stanford University&#8217;s studios, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, expert on U.S. policy in Honduras. We&#8217;ll link to your piece , &quot;Who&#8217;s Responsible for the Flight of Honduran Children?&quot; as well as the other one , &quot;The Thugocracy Next Door,&quot; which appeared in Politico magazine.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: This week saw the first planeload of children deported to Honduras since President Obama vowed to speed up the removal of more than 57,000 youths who’ve fled to the United States from Central America in recent months. The group of 38 deportees included 21 children between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, along with 17 female family members.

Among them was Victoria Cordova, who came to the United States with her nine-year-old daughter. They were captured at the U.S.-Mexico border after a 25-day journey and are now back in San Pedro Sula, the city with the highest murder rate in the world. Last month, children in Honduras were murdered at a rate of more than one per day. Cordova described her ordeal to reporters.

VICTORIACORDOVA: [translated] I don’t have any work. It’s been four months without work. This is a part of what motivated me to go—the poverty, the situation here, this insecurity we live through. We see children nearby who are very young, 12 and 13 years old, and they drug themselves. It’s terrible to live like this. Here we live a life where you can’t even call the police, because they are controlled by the gangs.

When we crossed the river and they trapped us, we didn’t think. We had some hope. And then, when we arrived in McAllen, we were on the floor. There was dust. There were a lot of people there, and I was there for various hours. They call it an ice box, because it’s very cold there. We were there for two days. They took us to El Paso, Texas, on a plane, and there in El Paso, Texas, we spent two days there sleeping on the ground, cold.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Tuesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the experience of Cordova and others should demonstrate to Central Americans that, quote, "they will not be welcomed to this country with open arms."

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Honduran officials called for an increase in U.S. aid to Central America. Honduran Foreign Minister Mireya Agüero called for a, quote, "mini-Marshall Plan," similar to the U.S. anti-drug programs in Colombia and Mexico.

AMYGOODMAN: In fact, U.S. funding and foreign policy has long shaped the lives of Central Americans. June 28th marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup that deposed the democratically elected Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya, which the U.S did not oppose. Our next guest argues it was the coup, more than drug trafficking and gangs, that opened the doors to the violence in Honduras and unleashed an ongoing wave of state-sponsored repression.

We’re joined right now by Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, an expert on human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras. She recently authored a piece titled "Who’s Responsible for the Flight of Honduran Children?" And in February, her article, "The Thugocracy Next Door," appeared in Politico magazine.

Dana Frank, welcome to Democracy Now!

DANAFRANK: Thanks a lot.

AMYGOODMAN: Thank you for joining us from the Stanford University studios. Explain what the background is for so many—and so many children—to be fleeing the violence in Honduras.

DANAFRANK: Yeah, I think, you know, we keep hearing the fact that people are fleeing gangs and violence, but there hasn’t been an analysis or discussion of why is there so much gang activity and violence in Honduras. And the answer is this tremendous criminality that the 2009 military coup opened the door to when it overthrew the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya. The coup, of course, itself was a criminal act, and it really opened the door for this spectacular corruption of the police and up-and-down, top-to-bottom of the government. And that, in turn, means it’s possible to kill anybody you want, practically, and nothing will happen to you. It’s widely documented that the police are overwhelmingly corrupt. Even a government official charged with cleaning up the police admitted last fall that 70 percent of the Honduran police are beyond saving. And you heard the woman, Ms. Cordova, say that the police themselves are tied in with organized crime and drug traffickers. So, when we talk about this violence, it’s really important to understand there’s almost no functioning criminal justice system and no political will at the top to do anything about this.

The president, the new president, Juan Orlando Hernández, who came into power in January, himself was a major backer of the criminal coup when he was the president—was head of a key committee in the Honduran Congress at the time, and a year and a half ago, as president of the Honduran Congress, illegally overthrew part of the Supreme Court, and he illegally was part of naming a new attorney general loyal to him last summer, named to an illegal five-year term. And he’s built his campaign not around cleaning up the police, but a new military police that is expanding this militarization of Honduran society, and that military police itself is committing serious human rights abuses, including, recently in May, beating up and jailing the most prominent advocate for children in Honduras.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dana Frank, I remember being in San Pedro Sula back in the early 1990s. I mean, not only was the level of corruption incredibly high among the police forces, but there were—the military was out in the streets constantly patrolling. It’s also one of the poorest countries in all of the Americas. You’ve also referred to the impact of the CAFTA deal on Honduras and on the poverty of the country.

DANAFRANK: Oh, yeah, certainly, it’s not like there was ever a golden age in Honduras. But, you know, as Senator Tim Kaine said in a hearing for the new ambassador of Honduras, that Hondurans are saying that the level of militarization, as well—he said the level of military repression and terror there is worse than it was in the early 1980s at the height of the U.S.-funded Contra war in Nicaragua that Honduras was the base for. So we need to talk about, relatively, this is even more terrifying than then, which is really saying a lot.

Yeah, when we talk about the fleeing gangs and violence, it’s also this tremendous poverty. And poverty doesn’t just happen. It, itself, is a direct result of policies of both the Honduran government and the U.S. government, including privatizations, mass layoffs of government workers, and a new—in Honduras, a new law, that’s now made permanent, that breaks up full-time jobs and makes them part-time and ineligible for unionization, living wage and the national health service. And a lot of these economic policies are driven by U.S.-funded lending organizations like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, which itself is funding the corrupt Honduran police. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is the other piece of this. Like NAFTA did for the U.S. and Mexico, it opens the door to this open competition between small producers in agriculture in Honduras, small manufacturers, and jobs are disappearing as a result of that.

So, with this poverty that we’re seeing that people are fleeing, it’s not like people are like, "Let’s go have the American dream." There are almost no jobs for young people. Their parents know it. And we’re talking about starving to death—that’s the alternative—or being driven into gangs with tremendous sexual violence. And it’s a very, very tragic situation here. But it’s not like it tragically just happened. It’s a direct result of very conscious policies by the U.S. and Honduran governments.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor Frank, I wanted to go to this issue of U.S. responsibility and turn to former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted five years ago. We got a chance to sit down with him in 2011 at his home in Tegucigalpa. I had just flown in with him. This was after the coup when a new president was chosen. And his family flew back from Nicaragua to Honduras. It was the first time that he was at his home for several years.

MANUELZELAYA: [translated] The U.S. State Department has always denied, and they continue to deny, any ties with the coup d’état. Nevertheless, all of the proof incriminates the U.S. government. And all of the actions that were taken by the de facto regime, or the golpista regime, which are those who carried out the coup, and it is to make favor of the industrial policies and the military policies and the financial policies of the United States in Honduras.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Professor Dana Frank, he strongly felt that the U.S. was involved with the coup. What evidence is there for that?

DANAFRANK: Well, the biggest evidence we have is that his plane stopped at the air force base at Palmerola, known as Soto Cano Air Force Base now, which is a joint U.S. and Honduran base. That plane could not have stopped there without U.S. permission. We don’t have the big smoking guns. We certainly have the behavior of the U.S. State Department and the White House after the coup, which was to legitimate the coup government as an equal partner to Zelaya—in fact, as a superior partner. They never denounced the spectacular repression after the coup. And they treated Zelaya like a bad child for trying to return to his own country. They recognized—they announced that they would recognize the outcome of the illegitimate November elections after that, even before the votes were counted. And it was clearly they wanted the whole situation to go away.

I mean, they clearly—Zelaya was, in many ways, the weakest domino of all the center-left and left governments that had come to power in Latin America in the previous 15 years. And it was a message to all those other governments that we will back coups, and we will overthrow you, as well. The U.S. then supported President Lobo, the outcome of that November 2009 election, and made up this fiction that it was a government of national reconciliation, and, ever since, has been turning a blind eye, for the most part, to the spectacular human rights abuses, including killings by state security forces and really spectacular lack of political will to deal with corruption at the very top of the government. And the U.S. keeps acting like this is just a hunky-dory government that we should be working with as a partner.

You know, I found it tremendously chilling to be reading newspaper reports and media reports of that planeload of children that came back to Honduras and the U.S. working with the Honduran government, welcoming those children with open arms, when the government itself is countenancing this problem. The government itself, you know, beat—has countenanced the beating up of the leading independent children’s activist in the country. The government itself doesn’t have the political will to clean up the police. So, what does it mean that we’re working with this partner to help these Honduran children?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We’re also joined by Jennifer Harbury, a human rights activist and lawyer based in Weslaco, Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla commander, disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. She’s the author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala and has spent decades pressing for declassified information on her husband’s case.

Welcome, Jennifer Harbury.

JENNIFERHARBURY: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be with you.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Talk to us about the—as we’ve been discussing Honduras, many of the children are also coming from Guatemala. And again, some of that history of U.S. involvement in Guatemala, especially in recent years.

JENNIFERHARBURY: Yes. We’ve been horrified by the thought of sending any of these children back, since, by international and domestic law, they qualify as refugees, almost all of them.

I can certainly talk about the Guatemalan counterpart to what Dana was just discussing. We talk sometimes about maybe the solution is to send more funding—as she was saying, a new Marshall Plan—to Central American countries. But that’s in fact going to pour gasoline on the fire, especially in Guatemala, where a number of former and current top officials in the military are in fact the drug lords. Some of them have left the military; some are still in. They got involved in the drug trade while the wars were going on and they had airstrips that were valuable to the Colombian drug lords. They became very wealthy that way and now have what are called parallel structures. And they organize, arm and train the gangs themselves to do their dirty work.

For example, the Zeta cartel that terrorize the border strip where I live now, which is almost down to Brownsville—I’m 10 miles from the Rio Grande—the Zetas are one of the most feared cartels anywhere, totally brutal. They were armed, trained and organized by the Guatemalan military special forces, called the Kaibiles, who, of course, in turn, were armed, trained, organized, etc., by the United States intelligence networks, and trained many of them at the School of the Americas. Another example is Julio Roberto Alpirez, a colonel, one of many high-level military officials, who is on the DEA corrupt officer list, but because he also worked as a paid CIA informant, no one has ever been able to go after him. So, much like Honduras, we have one of the highest murder rates in the world. The femicide rate is something like 10 times higher than that in Juárez.

As these refugees pour into the United States, we’re taking all kinds of measures to justify sending them back and claiming they’re not refugees. But the way we’re doing that is to expedite or rush them through proceedings so quickly that they can’t really tell their stories. And, of course, they have no legal advice. And basically turns on whether or not a 10-year-old child, when confronted with a Border Patrol agent, or young mother confronted with a Border Patrol agent, is able and willing to say, "I’m asking for political asylum. I’m in danger of persecution or abuse at the hands of the drug lords and the gangs." And all of those people know, if they ever say those words, they’re going to be dead when they go back home. It’s the death penalty to squeal, basically, on the gangs and the drug lords in any way. So, without a lawyer, within days, they’re going to be headed home under expedited proceedings.

And this is a violation of international law and also U.S. domestic law. If they qualify for asylum or treatment under the Convention Against Torture, if they’re in danger of being harmed in this way by people who either are government officials or who are acting without the local governments being able or "willing," quote-unquote, to protect the population, then these people are refugees. They cannot be sent back. And sweeping them under the rug and getting them out of the country so fast that they can’t tell their stories or get any legal advice is a double violation of humanitarian law, and it’s something we’re going to be answering for for a long time. We’re certainly not proud of having turned back the boatload of Jews to Nazi Germany, but at least we didn’t sail out on the high seas, board the ships and throw people overboard. These are children. These are refugees. We have to let them in.

There are many kinds of programs that we can put into action that would deal with the situation well, in the same way we’ve done before. We can do deferred action, deferred enforcement, temporary protected status. We’ve done those things for Honduras and Haiti. It would let people stay for a year or two and then have the danger in their homelands reconsidered. Meanwhile, they can work and support themselves. It would relieve the backup in the court. There’s many alternatives. We’re choosing to pretend that they’re not refugees, and send them home in violation of the law.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we thank you both very much for being with us. We’ll link to both of your work.

Jennifer Harbury, human rights activist and lawyer, we’re speaking to her right near the border in Weslaco, Texas, near the Mexico border. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a Mayan guerrilla commander, disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. He was tortured. He was murdered. And those involved with his killing were trained by the United States, and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency.

Dana Frank, we thank you for being with us from Stanford University’s studios, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, expert on U.S. policy in Honduras. We’ll link to your piece, "Who’s Responsible for the Flight of Honduran Children?" as well as the other one, "The Thugocracy Next Door," which appeared in Politico magazine.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Stay with us.

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Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 -0400Ríos Montt Genocide Verdict Annulled, But Activists Ensure US-Backed Crimes Will Never Be Forgottenhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/23/ros_montt_genocide_verdict_annulled_but
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-23:en/story/3d0142 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Guatemala. The country&#8217;s top court has overturned the genocide conviction of former U.S.-backed military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. In a historic verdict earlier this month, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. But now the status of the verdict is in question. In a three-to-two ruling Monday, the Guatemalan constitutional court dismissed all the case&#8217;s proceedings dating back to a month ago. It was then that the court first annulled the case amidst a dispute between judges over jurisdiction. This is Constitutional Court Deputy Secretary Giovanni Salguero.
GIOVANNI SALGUERO : [translated] Everything said in the phase of moral and public debate of the legal process will be intercepted under the process of amparo from April 19, 2013. All proceedings before that date are annulled.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the run-up to its latest decision to overturn, the court had come under heavy lobbying from Ríos Montt supporters, including the military and Guatemala&#8217;s powerful business association. Ríos Montt remains in a military hospital, where he was admitted last week. His legal status is now up in the air. He will likely be released into house arrest, and it is unclear when or if he will return to court.
AMY GOODMAN : For more, we&#8217;re joined by Helen Mack, one of Guatemala&#8217;s most well-known human rights activists, president of the Myrna Mack Foundation, named after her sister, a Guatemalan anthropologist who was assassinated in Guatemala September 11, 1990. Helen spent 14 years bringing the officers and generals responsible for her sister&#8217;s murder to justice. She recently attended and monitored parts of the Ríos Montt genocide trial.
And we&#8217;re joined by Kate Doyle, senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America and director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. She also attended the Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala, filing reports from inside the courtroom for the Open Society Foundation. She is winner of the ALBA /Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism and featured in the documentary Granito: How to Nail a Dictator .
Helen Mack, Kate Doyle, welcome to Democracy Now! Helen, your response to the overturning of this verdict?
HELEN MACK : It was not unpredictable. Since the very beginning, it was very clear the legal strategy that the defense wanted, they never wanted to discuss or to dismiss all the charges that were given to Rodríguez Sánchez and Ríos Montt, so everybody was expecting this. And I think that, for Guatemala, we lost an opportunity, and for the victims, it&#8217;s a misrespect. But overall is that it is in evidence that the justice system doesn&#8217;t work for everybody, that we are not equal before law. It&#8217;s just for an elite that it works. And due process is only according to what I want to be understand. It&#8217;s not what is the laws.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what was the actual argument that the court used to overturn the verdict and the sentence?
HELEN MACK : Every ruling that they have been given is under illegal issues, because this is the defendant, in some—the defense. In many of this is—there is a law that says, even in the—two judges from the Constitutional Court has dissented opinions and saying, &quot;We are not—we don&#8217;t have to rule right now, because that&#8217;s from ordinary justice.&quot; And even though they want to do it, because they want to cancel, they have never had the intention to really discuss in a healthy way if there was or there wasn&#8217;t genocide.
AMY GOODMAN : Helen Mack, we all know about September 11th, September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people were incinerated in a moment in this country, but there was another September 11, September 11, 1990, with the murder of your sister Myrna Mack. Can you tell us what happened to her, and then how you sought justice and a conviction—in some cases, that were overturned, but later reinstated—how her story, Myrna&#8217;s story in 1990, fits into the genocide trial of Ríos Montt?
HELEN MACK : My sister was making an academic research about the displaced people. And, of course, she was documenting many of the stories and everything that happened in the Ixil area. And that&#8217;s why she was killed.
AMY GOODMAN : In the Ixil area, the northwest highlands.
HELEN MACK : In the Ixil area. And so, she documented that, and that is part of what we were discussing now in the genocide case. So, even many of her notes were part of the—in this process in the genocide case, but also it was part of the [inaudible]—the peace accords of the returning for the displaced and refugees people, her studies. And that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s like a extended justice also for my sister. Everything has been proved now academically and also by the testimonies—
AMY GOODMAN : Who killed her?
HELEN MACK : The army. It was the high presidential high command. As the genocide case took 13 years to build the case, it also took, to me, also 14 years to build the case. So that means that when they accuse us that there is no people from the guerrilla on trial, I can ask them, &quot;How many of the military victims have had the patience to build a case for 14 years?&quot; So those are, you know, the arguments—
AMY GOODMAN : When your sister was killed, what were you doing at the time? And what was your political orientation in Guatemala?
HELEN MACK : I was on the other side of the Guatemala. I was a—my profession is a businesswoman. I was working on construction building for housing projects, and I was also working for an educational project for illiteracy, because I really believe in education. I was really more conservative than what I am. And then I understood that justice doesn&#8217;t have any ideology. Justice is justice. It doesn&#8217;t matter if you&#8217;re right- or left-wing. Justice is justice. And what you want is punishment for those who have violated the law.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Kate Doyle, I&#8217;d like to ask you about the role—your role in this whole process of the trial of Ríos Montt and the importance of the National Security Archives and what you were able to uncover in assisting with this prosecution.
KATE DOYLE : Sure, Juan. The National Security Archive has worked for many years to try to uncover the hidden history of the U.S. policy in Guatemala and other places around the world. And one of the contributions that we made to this particular case was to obtain the declassification of CIA and Pentagon and embassy files that specifically identified what Guatemalan military officers, were posted where in 1982, what kind of strategy and tactics were the Guatemalan military using at that time, and even talking about some of the specific massacres that are at stake in this case. It&#8217;s important that the United States had such a close and supportive relationship with the Guatemalan army all through the civil conflict. For that reason, the U.S. files, secret files, are filled with information about how Guatemala was functioning at that time, and the Ríos Montt regime, in particular.
AMY GOODMAN : And what was the U.S. doing when Ríos Montt was in power?
KATE DOYLE : The U.S. had, some years prior, cut off overt military assistance to Guatemala under Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Congress&#8217;s restrictions on aid under human rights conditions. But the U.S. was extremely eager to embrace Ríos Montt as an ally within its own strategic interests in Central America at the time of the war against—the secret war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The U.S. was in search of partners in the region to help them promote and promulgate that secret war. And though the U.S. overt aid was cut off long before, CIA funds, millions of dollars, continued to flow to military intelligence in Guatemala, we discovered in a scandal some years later.
AMY GOODMAN : Helen Mack, the case of Myrna Mack, you tried in—was tried in 2002. So, talk about who was found guilty and what happened to those verdicts.
HELEN MACK : It was done by—ordered by the presidential high command. General Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitán was there; Juan Valencia Osorio, who was the convicted colonel; and Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera. What happened is that, because the reasonable doubt, they absolved the general and the other one, and they convicted Valencia Osorio. But then, when the police and the Ministério Público were going to capture him, a military unit came in, and they took him, and they helped him to flew, so—to flee, so that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s an impunity, that case.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I&#8217;d like to ask you, in terms of the implications of this—of the proceedings in this Ríos Montt trial to the current government of Guatemala, and your sense of whether current government officials were also implicated or involved in some of the genocide that was conducted against the Mayan people?
HELEN MACK : I think that the—precisely, because we have a president that is a military, many other people feel that is a threat for transitional justice. And in Guatemala, there has been a spirit of— espíritu de cuerpo ?
KATE DOYLE : Esprit de corps ?
HELEN MACK : Esprit de corps that they prefer to be convicted before they talk, because there is a blood—
KATE DOYLE : Oath.
HELEN MACK : Yeah. And—
AMY GOODMAN : A kind of blood oath.
HELEN MACK : Yeah. If they talk, I mean, that&#8217;s why—because that&#8217;s what had happened in Argentina. When someone started talking, it was like the domino effect. And that&#8217;s what they are trying not to happen in Guatemala. So that is why it&#8217;s so hard to get convictions in Guatemala or to make military to talk. So it&#8217;s about the importance of the documents that the National Security Archive has done, it&#8217;s a documentary evidence. And then you have testimonies that verified that that was truth and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happened.
AMY GOODMAN : So, in the case of Myrna, your sister, an appeals court later overturned the conviction, just like we&#8217;re seeing with Ríos Montt.
HELEN MACK : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : But then, last year, it was reinstated—in 2003, rather, about 10 years ago, it was reinstated by the Supreme Court. Kate Doyle, do you see that possibility? Where can this case go? So, the case has been thrown out by this court, but it&#8217;s not necessarily over.
KATE DOYLE : Absolutely not. I mean, it&#8217;s not over by any means. The survivors of the massacres, who spoke the first time around in March and April, are waiting in the wings, and if they have to speak again, they will speak again. Excuse me. The prosecutors are preparing to fight for their case. And there is no doubt in my mind that the team that brought this case to trial, that spent more than 10 years doing that—and, really, we should talk, when we talk about the survivors, spent more than 30 years doing that, saving those stories for this moment. That team is waiting to proceed. And the kinds of legal manipulation we&#8217;ve seen in this case, as Helen pointed out, has happened over and over again. It&#8217;s not just in the case of the assassination of her sister; it&#8217;s in many other cases. And this is par for the course for the defense team in Guatemala. Unfortunately, they don&#8217;t have a legal argument to protect their client, and so they are using legal manipulation to try to game the system.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And is the potential that the case will be moved to another judge possible, or will be same judge continue to hear the case?
KATE DOYLE : It is unclear today at this moment what is going to happen. There is the potential that this entire case will be moved to another tribunal so as not to pose the threat of double jeopardy to the defendant by hearing it in the same tribunal.
HELEN MACK : I just want to make a difference between this case and my sister&#8217;s case. I would say that in my sister&#8217;s case it was more clean, in that sense they allowed the system to work. In this genocide case, they haven&#8217;t allowed the system to work. They have been manipulating since the very beginning, so the rule of law, it has been weakening, especially the judicial power. And I think that is the worst thing that had happened. I think that the idea and the strategy of changing to another tribunal is to make them free and there is no conviction for genocide case.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly, I want to turn to the declassified CIA documents that your organization, the National Security Archive, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. It was a February 5th, 1982, document that states, &quot;The Guatemalan military&#8217;s plans to begin sweeps through the Ixil Triangle area, which has the largest concentrations of guerillas and sympathizers in the country could lead not only to major clashes but to serious abuses by the armed forces.&quot; The document goes on to say Chief of Staff General Benedicto Lucas García indicated, quote, &quot;it probably will be necessary to destroy a number of villages.&quot;
Another declassified CIA document, also from February &#39;82, describes the Guatemalan army &quot;sweep&quot; operation through the Ixil Triangle in El Quiché. According to the cable&#39;s author—this is the U.S. government—the army had yet to encounter a major guerrilla force in the area. Its successes were limited to the destruction of entire villages and the killing of peasants suspected of collaborating with rebels. The document says the army&#8217;s belief that the entire indigenous population of Ixil supports the guerrillas, quote, &quot;has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.&quot;
As we wrap up, Kate Doyle, this trove of documents that you have that are the sort of heart of the National Security Archive, how can people access them? And also, just the fact that clearly the U.S. government knew exactly what the Guatemalan military was doing—this was during the Reagan years—and yet continuing, as you said, to funnel them millions of dollars.
KATE DOYLE : The Reagan administration not only continued to secretly funnel millions of dollars, but they openly flacked for this government. People like Elliott Abrams, who was the assistant secretary for human rights, for crying out loud, was out there on the television and before the press and before the Congress over and over again telling the U.S. public how democratic and what a reformist this man was and why we had to support him. If your listeners or your viewers want to take a look at the original declassified U.S. documents in this case and many others, they can go to the National Security Archive&#8217;s website, which is nsarchive.org/Guatemala .
AMY GOODMAN : It want to thank you both for being with us. It&#8217;s been an honor to have you with us. Helen Mack is now running the Myrna Mack Foundation and is a winner of the Right Livelihood Award. Kate Doyle, Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, Father Solalinde. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Guatemala. The country’s top court has overturned the genocide conviction of former U.S.-backed military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. In a historic verdict earlier this month, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years for genocide and crimes against humanity in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people in the early 1980s. But now the status of the verdict is in question. In a three-to-two ruling Monday, the Guatemalan constitutional court dismissed all the case’s proceedings dating back to a month ago. It was then that the court first annulled the case amidst a dispute between judges over jurisdiction. This is Constitutional Court Deputy Secretary Giovanni Salguero.

GIOVANNISALGUERO: [translated] Everything said in the phase of moral and public debate of the legal process will be intercepted under the process of amparo from April 19, 2013. All proceedings before that date are annulled.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: In the run-up to its latest decision to overturn, the court had come under heavy lobbying from Ríos Montt supporters, including the military and Guatemala’s powerful business association. Ríos Montt remains in a military hospital, where he was admitted last week. His legal status is now up in the air. He will likely be released into house arrest, and it is unclear when or if he will return to court.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Helen Mack, one of Guatemala’s most well-known human rights activists, president of the Myrna Mack Foundation, named after her sister, a Guatemalan anthropologist who was assassinated in Guatemala September 11, 1990. Helen spent 14 years bringing the officers and generals responsible for her sister’s murder to justice. She recently attended and monitored parts of the Ríos Montt genocide trial.

And we’re joined by Kate Doyle, senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America and director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. She also attended the Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala, filing reports from inside the courtroom for the Open Society Foundation. She is winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism and featured in the documentary Granito: How to Nail a Dictator.

HELENMACK: It was not unpredictable. Since the very beginning, it was very clear the legal strategy that the defense wanted, they never wanted to discuss or to dismiss all the charges that were given to Rodríguez Sánchez and Ríos Montt, so everybody was expecting this. And I think that, for Guatemala, we lost an opportunity, and for the victims, it’s a misrespect. But overall is that it is in evidence that the justice system doesn’t work for everybody, that we are not equal before law. It’s just for an elite that it works. And due process is only according to what I want to be understand. It’s not what is the laws.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what was the actual argument that the court used to overturn the verdict and the sentence?

HELENMACK: Every ruling that they have been given is under illegal issues, because this is the defendant, in some—the defense. In many of this is—there is a law that says, even in the—two judges from the Constitutional Court has dissented opinions and saying, "We are not—we don’t have to rule right now, because that’s from ordinary justice." And even though they want to do it, because they want to cancel, they have never had the intention to really discuss in a healthy way if there was or there wasn’t genocide.

AMYGOODMAN: Helen Mack, we all know about September 11th, September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people were incinerated in a moment in this country, but there was another September 11, September 11, 1990, with the murder of your sister Myrna Mack. Can you tell us what happened to her, and then how you sought justice and a conviction—in some cases, that were overturned, but later reinstated—how her story, Myrna’s story in 1990, fits into the genocide trial of Ríos Montt?

HELENMACK: My sister was making an academic research about the displaced people. And, of course, she was documenting many of the stories and everything that happened in the Ixil area. And that’s why she was killed.

AMYGOODMAN: In the Ixil area, the northwest highlands.

HELENMACK: In the Ixil area. And so, she documented that, and that is part of what we were discussing now in the genocide case. So, even many of her notes were part of the—in this process in the genocide case, but also it was part of the [inaudible]—the peace accords of the returning for the displaced and refugees people, her studies. And that’s why it’s like a extended justice also for my sister. Everything has been proved now academically and also by the testimonies—

AMYGOODMAN: Who killed her?

HELENMACK: The army. It was the high presidential high command. As the genocide case took 13 years to build the case, it also took, to me, also 14 years to build the case. So that means that when they accuse us that there is no people from the guerrilla on trial, I can ask them, "How many of the military victims have had the patience to build a case for 14 years?" So those are, you know, the arguments—

AMYGOODMAN: When your sister was killed, what were you doing at the time? And what was your political orientation in Guatemala?

HELENMACK: I was on the other side of the Guatemala. I was a—my profession is a businesswoman. I was working on construction building for housing projects, and I was also working for an educational project for illiteracy, because I really believe in education. I was really more conservative than what I am. And then I understood that justice doesn’t have any ideology. Justice is justice. It doesn’t matter if you’re right- or left-wing. Justice is justice. And what you want is punishment for those who have violated the law.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Kate Doyle, I’d like to ask you about the role—your role in this whole process of the trial of Ríos Montt and the importance of the National Security Archives and what you were able to uncover in assisting with this prosecution.

KATEDOYLE: Sure, Juan. The National Security Archive has worked for many years to try to uncover the hidden history of the U.S. policy in Guatemala and other places around the world. And one of the contributions that we made to this particular case was to obtain the declassification of CIA and Pentagon and embassy files that specifically identified what Guatemalan military officers, were posted where in 1982, what kind of strategy and tactics were the Guatemalan military using at that time, and even talking about some of the specific massacres that are at stake in this case. It’s important that the United States had such a close and supportive relationship with the Guatemalan army all through the civil conflict. For that reason, the U.S. files, secret files, are filled with information about how Guatemala was functioning at that time, and the Ríos Montt regime, in particular.

AMYGOODMAN: And what was the U.S. doing when Ríos Montt was in power?

KATEDOYLE: The U.S. had, some years prior, cut off overt military assistance to Guatemala under Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Congress’s restrictions on aid under human rights conditions. But the U.S. was extremely eager to embrace Ríos Montt as an ally within its own strategic interests in Central America at the time of the war against—the secret war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The U.S. was in search of partners in the region to help them promote and promulgate that secret war. And though the U.S. overt aid was cut off long before, CIA funds, millions of dollars, continued to flow to military intelligence in Guatemala, we discovered in a scandal some years later.

AMYGOODMAN: Helen Mack, the case of Myrna Mack, you tried in—was tried in 2002. So, talk about who was found guilty and what happened to those verdicts.

HELENMACK: It was done by—ordered by the presidential high command. General Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitán was there; Juan Valencia Osorio, who was the convicted colonel; and Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera. What happened is that, because the reasonable doubt, they absolved the general and the other one, and they convicted Valencia Osorio. But then, when the police and the Ministério Público were going to capture him, a military unit came in, and they took him, and they helped him to flew, so—to flee, so that’s why it’s an impunity, that case.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’d like to ask you, in terms of the implications of this—of the proceedings in this Ríos Montt trial to the current government of Guatemala, and your sense of whether current government officials were also implicated or involved in some of the genocide that was conducted against the Mayan people?

HELENMACK: I think that the—precisely, because we have a president that is a military, many other people feel that is a threat for transitional justice. And in Guatemala, there has been a spirit of— espíritu de cuerpo?

KATEDOYLE:Esprit de corps?

HELENMACK:Esprit de corps that they prefer to be convicted before they talk, because there is a blood—

KATEDOYLE: Oath.

HELENMACK: Yeah. And—

AMYGOODMAN: A kind of blood oath.

HELENMACK: Yeah. If they talk, I mean, that’s why—because that’s what had happened in Argentina. When someone started talking, it was like the domino effect. And that’s what they are trying not to happen in Guatemala. So that is why it’s so hard to get convictions in Guatemala or to make military to talk. So it’s about the importance of the documents that the National Security Archive has done, it’s a documentary evidence. And then you have testimonies that verified that that was truth and that’s what’s happened.

AMYGOODMAN: So, in the case of Myrna, your sister, an appeals court later overturned the conviction, just like we’re seeing with Ríos Montt.

HELENMACK: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: But then, last year, it was reinstated—in 2003, rather, about 10 years ago, it was reinstated by the Supreme Court. Kate Doyle, do you see that possibility? Where can this case go? So, the case has been thrown out by this court, but it’s not necessarily over.

KATEDOYLE: Absolutely not. I mean, it’s not over by any means. The survivors of the massacres, who spoke the first time around in March and April, are waiting in the wings, and if they have to speak again, they will speak again. Excuse me. The prosecutors are preparing to fight for their case. And there is no doubt in my mind that the team that brought this case to trial, that spent more than 10 years doing that—and, really, we should talk, when we talk about the survivors, spent more than 30 years doing that, saving those stories for this moment. That team is waiting to proceed. And the kinds of legal manipulation we’ve seen in this case, as Helen pointed out, has happened over and over again. It’s not just in the case of the assassination of her sister; it’s in many other cases. And this is par for the course for the defense team in Guatemala. Unfortunately, they don’t have a legal argument to protect their client, and so they are using legal manipulation to try to game the system.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And is the potential that the case will be moved to another judge possible, or will be same judge continue to hear the case?

KATEDOYLE: It is unclear today at this moment what is going to happen. There is the potential that this entire case will be moved to another tribunal so as not to pose the threat of double jeopardy to the defendant by hearing it in the same tribunal.

HELENMACK: I just want to make a difference between this case and my sister’s case. I would say that in my sister’s case it was more clean, in that sense they allowed the system to work. In this genocide case, they haven’t allowed the system to work. They have been manipulating since the very beginning, so the rule of law, it has been weakening, especially the judicial power. And I think that is the worst thing that had happened. I think that the idea and the strategy of changing to another tribunal is to make them free and there is no conviction for genocide case.

AMYGOODMAN: Very quickly, I want to turn to the declassified CIA documents that your organization, the National Security Archive, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. It was a February 5th, 1982, document that states, "The Guatemalan military’s plans to begin sweeps through the Ixil Triangle area, which has the largest concentrations of guerillas and sympathizers in the country could lead not only to major clashes but to serious abuses by the armed forces." The document goes on to say Chief of Staff General Benedicto Lucas García indicated, quote, "it probably will be necessary to destroy a number of villages."

Another declassified CIA document, also from February '82, describes the Guatemalan army "sweep" operation through the Ixil Triangle in El Quiché. According to the cable's author—this is the U.S. government—the army had yet to encounter a major guerrilla force in the area. Its successes were limited to the destruction of entire villages and the killing of peasants suspected of collaborating with rebels. The document says the army’s belief that the entire indigenous population of Ixil supports the guerrillas, quote, "has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

As we wrap up, Kate Doyle, this trove of documents that you have that are the sort of heart of the National Security Archive, how can people access them? And also, just the fact that clearly the U.S. government knew exactly what the Guatemalan military was doing—this was during the Reagan years—and yet continuing, as you said, to funnel them millions of dollars.

KATEDOYLE: The Reagan administration not only continued to secretly funnel millions of dollars, but they openly flacked for this government. People like Elliott Abrams, who was the assistant secretary for human rights, for crying out loud, was out there on the television and before the press and before the Congress over and over again telling the U.S. public how democratic and what a reformist this man was and why we had to support him. If your listeners or your viewers want to take a look at the original declassified U.S. documents in this case and many others, they can go to the National Security Archive’s website, which is nsarchive.org/Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: It want to thank you both for being with us. It’s been an honor to have you with us. Helen Mack is now running the Myrna Mack Foundation and is a winner of the Right Livelihood Award. Kate Doyle, Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Father Solalinde. Stay with us.

Former Guatemalan President Efraín Ríos Montt was hauled off to prison last Friday. It was a historic moment, the first time in history that a former leader of a country was tried for genocide in a national court. More than three decades after he seized power in a coup in Guatemala, unleashing a U.S.-backed campaign of slaughter against his own people, the 86-year-old stood trial, charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. He was given an 80-year prison sentence. The case was inspired and pursued by three brave Guatemalan women: the judge, the attorney general and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

“My brother Patrocinio was burnt to death in the Ixil region. We never found his remains,” Rigoberta Menchu told me after Rios Montt’s verdict was announced. She detailed the systematic slaughter of her family: “As for my mother, we never found her remains, either. ... If her remains weren’t eaten by wild animals after having been tortured brutally and humiliated, then her remains are probably in a mass grave close to the Ixil region. ... My father was also burned alive in the embassy of Spain [in Guatemala City] on January 30th, 1980.”

Rigoberta Menchu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, “in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.” She continued telling me about her family’s destruction: “In 1983, my brother Victor Menchu was also shot dead. His wife had her throat slit, and he was fleeing with his three children. Victor was jailed in the little town, but his three children were kept in a military bunker. My two nieces died of hunger in this military base, and my brother Victor was shot. We still have not found his remains.”

According to the official Commission on Historical Clarification, which undertook a comprehensive investigation of Guatemala’s three-decade genocide, at least 200,000 people were killed. Menchu brought one of the original lawsuits against the perpetrators of the genocide, which resulted in the trial that ended with Rios Montt’s conviction.

Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey was appointed as Guatemala’s first female attorney general in December 2010, and has earned wide acclaim for her pursuit of perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The judge in the case is another woman, Yassmin Barrios. In a country where, historically, people who challenge those in power are often killed, Paz y Paz and Barrios demonstrated tremendous courage.

Journalist Allan Nairn, who has covered Guatemala, among other conflict zones, since the early 1980s, observed the trial. In mid-April, the trial was ordered shut down by another Guatemalan court, presumably under the influence of President Otto Perez Molina. From Guatemala City, Nairn reported then: “The judge, Yassmin Barrios, and the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, both say they’re going to defy this order to kill the case, which is extraordinary.” They continued the trial, and eventually Ríos Montt was found guilty. Nairn said, after the verdict: “Judge Barrios ... ran the trial. She was the one who had to deliver the verdict. As she left the courthouse every night, you could see her wearing a bulletproof vest. The judges and prosecutors involved in the case received death threats. In one case, a threat against a prosecutor, the person delivering the threat put a pistol on the table and said, ‘I know where your children are.’ It takes a lot of courage to push a case like this.”

Menchu said: “This verdict is historic. It’s monumental. The verdict against Rios Montt is historic. We waited for 33 years for justice to prevail. It’s clear that there is no peace without justice.” It is all the more so because it occurred in a national court in Guatemala. She noted that the International Criminal Court, as currently empowered, could not have taken the case, saying: “It’s not retroactive. It doesn’t address those cases that were committed before the court was created. So the statute of limitations on the International Criminal Court should be lifted.”

Nairn was supposed to testify at the trial. One interview he conducted in 1982 has attracted widespread attention. On camera, he spoke with “Major Tito,” who said entire families of indigenous villagers worked with the guerrillas. Tito’s troops told Nairn that they routinely killed such civilian villagers. “Tito,” it turns out, is none other than the current president of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina. Nairn sees the guilty verdict against Rios Montt as an opening to potential prosecution of Perez Molina and others: “There would be hundreds of U.S. officials who were complicit in this and should be subpoenaed, called before a grand jury and subjected to indictment — including [President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights] Elliott Abrams. And the U.S. should be ready to extradite them to Guatemala to face punishment, if the Guatemalan authorities are able to proceed with this. And General Perez Molina is one who should be included.”

Regardless of where the case goes from here, Guatemala has set an example for the world, away from violence and impunity. Or as Nairn puts it, “Guatemala’s Mayans have reached a higher level of

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,000 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.

Last week, Ríos Montt became the first former head of state to be found guilty of genocide in his or her own country. The former dictator was jailed Friday to begin an 80-year sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the killings of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayan people after he seized power in 1982.

Ríos Montt was a close ally of the United States. Former President Ronald Reagan once called him, quote, "a man of great personal integrity."

After the verdict, Judge Yassmin Barrios ordered the attorney general to launch an immediate investigation of, quote, "all others" connected to the crimes.

JUDGEYASSMINBARRIOS: [translated] In continuation of the investigation on the part of the public ministry, the tribunal orders the public ministry to continue the investigation against more people who could have participated in the acts which are being judged.

AMYGOODMAN: One former general implicated in abuses during the trial was Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina. In the early '80s, Pérez Molina was a military field commander in the Ixil region where the genocide occurred. At the time, he was operating under the alias "Major Tito Arias." During the trial, one former army officer accused him of participating in executions. It remains yet to be seen if he'll also be tried for crimes of genocide.

Well, today we’re going to Mexico City to be joined by a woman largely responsible for making sure that Ríos Montt was brought to justice. She began the process over a decade ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. Her name is Rigoberta Menchú. She’s the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She has published many books, including I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. She’s been translated into many languages, awarded more than 30 honorary degrees, and runs the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation.

We’re also joined by Allan Nairn. He was due to be a witness in the trial and covered Guatemala extensively in the early ’80s. He attended the trial.

Rigoberta Menchú and Allan Nairn, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Let’s start in Mexico City. Rigoberta Menchú, your response to the verdict and the 80-year sentence of Ríos Montt?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Thank you, Amy Goodman. Thank you for this opportunity. I want to express my condolences to the victims of Boston and Pennsylvania. I am here with you today.

This verdict is historic. It’s monumental. The verdict against Ríos Montt is historic. We waited for 33 years for justice to prevail. It’s clear that there is no peace without justice. There is no peace without truth. We need justice for the victims for there to be real peace. This verdict is crucial. It complements a long process of investigation, of denouncing the abuses, and a process that the victims hope will heal and result in reparations. So this verdict isn’t just about asking somebody to say they’re sorry. It is important to apologize, and President Otto Pérez Molina has to apologize. And the court will move in that direction. President Otto Pérez Molina must apologize, and the court has instructed him to do so.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Rigoberta Menchú, do you believe President Molina should resign?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Not just that alone does not suffice.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Do you believe, Rigoberta Menchú, that President Molina should resign?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Well, I would prefer not to embark on that debate. The most important thing is to understand the verdict for genocide as part of a larger process, and I am confident that there will be more trials. And if there are other high command officers who are responsible, I am confident that they will be brought to justice and the abuses will continue to be denounced and that justice will prevail in those cases, as well.

But in this case, a very important precedent has been set by this verdict. I am sure that Mr. Mauricio, who was the head of military intelligence and who was also part of the team of Ríos Montt, was absolved. And we thought that he should have also been convicted for genocide because he knew what was going on. So, this verdict shows that, on one hand, that Ríos Montt should be convicted for genocide, on very clear criterias, and he certainly was responsible for the genocide in Guatemala, but there are other high officials implicated in the genocide.

And the most important thing is that this verdict be respected and the court respected, and that the verdict and sentence be fulfilled, and that the court be fully respected, and that Judge Yassmin Barrios’ life be protected and all of the witnesses and victims, because a lot of people who are responsible for genocide are still free, and they are very aggressive, because they said that the victims were communists and subversives, and that’s why they deserved to be exterminated. And they accused the court and the judge of being communists, as well. And so, that shows that very little has really changed in Guatemala. So, we’re no longer in the Cold War, but certainly the rhetoric smacks of Cold War rhetoric. So this is a very delicate moment in Guatemala, and the most important thing is not to take a step backwards.

For me, there are four important reasons why we need to demand that the sentence be served, the verdict that was handed down on May 10th. First of all, this is a precedent and the first president in the whole world where a verdict has been handed down for genocide of a head of state in the country where it in fact occurred.

Secondly, this conviction for genocide proves that the victims spoke truth. For 32 years, victims have been seeking justice and have been documenting the abuses and suffering attacks by those who are responsible for genocide. They were. And we were accused of being liars. They said that we invented things, and they turned their back on us, and we were not supported by them. The hatred against the Mayans and the victims of the genocide is very—a tangible history in the last 32 years in Guatemala. So, justice has prevailed, though it sure took its time. But justice is prevailing, and the most important thing is that the sentence be served and the verdict respected.

The third crucial element has to do with the region that the genocide was committed in against the Ixil people, you know, that there were 200,000 victims of the genocide in Guatemala. There are 50,000 people who were disappeared. And there are victims throughout the country, not just in the region that was addressed in the trial. And so, in this regard, we are all Ixils. We identify fully with them, because we all suffered genocide as Mayans. And we need to remember that the policy of extermination and genocide against Mayans was also a policy of extermination of non-Mayans, as well. Unionists, student leaders also suffered. So, the genocide was by no means limited to the region of the territory of the Ixil people. So this is a crucial legal precedent for our country, and I think it can serve as the cornerstone for a new relationship amongst Guatemalans.

And I want to stress something that we have been saying for years. We have the International Criminal Court, but this International Criminal Court has not convicted genocide that has been committed. It’s waiting for new cases. It’s not retroactive. It doesn’t address those cases that were committed before the court was created. So the statute of limitations on the International Criminal Court should be lifted. So, this case really represents a—it poses a tremendous challenge to humanity. It’s a challenge for all countries who have allowed for genocide to occur in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break—

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] I don’t want to be controversial, but I do see that under Ronald Reagan and Bush’s administration there was a fantasy created of a third World War. And this fantasy really damaged the mentality of the military in Guatemala and Guatemalan fascists, and they still believe that communism exists. I don’t know what they’re referring to, but the truth is that here in Guatemala, women were raped, girls were raped, they strangled children, they assassinated and wiped out entire indigenous peoples, just because they thought they were so-called subversives and communists. So humanity really has to look into what occurred.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to our discussion with Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace laureate. She has just flown from attending the trial in Guatemala City to Mexico City, where we’re speaking to her, and we’ll be joined by investigative journalist Allan Nairn. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: Our guest in Mexico City is the Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú. It was her lawsuit that helped to lead to the conviction—first trial, then conviction and 80-year sentence of the former U.S.-backed dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt. He began his sentence on Friday night, after the sentence was read. Rigoberta Menchú, can you describe what happened to your own father?

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] Yes. Yes, well, as you know, the conviction of Ríos Montt has awakened the suffering that we carry, and we’re going to always feel that suffering as victims. In the case of my own family, my brother Patrocinio was burnt to death in the Ixil region. We never found his remains. We have looked for them. He may be on a farm that’s called the San Francisco Ranch, and he’s probably just in one of the mass graves.

As for my mother, we never found her remains, either. We don’t know if she was buried in a mass grave or eaten by wild animals. If it wasn’t her remains that were eaten by wild animals after having been tortured brutally and humiliated, then her remains are probably in a mass grave close to the Ixil region, because the truth is my family comes from an area very close to Ixil, even though we speak another language, which is Mayan Quiché.

My father was also burned alive in the embassy of Spain in January 30th, 1980. So this is why I feel the suffering of the victims who are clamoring for justice in the case against Ríos Montt, because under Lucas García, right before the coup d’état led by Ríos Montt, they burnt down the Spanish embassy where [my] father was. So, all of the abuses and violations that happened in 1982 and 1983, I suffered personally. My father had recently been burned alive. His name was Vicente Menchú.

So, in '83, my brother Victor was also shot dead. His name was Victor Menchú. He was killed, murdered in Uspantán, also very close to the Ixil region. He was captured by the army. He had fled with his three children to the rainforest. His wife had her throat slit, and he was fleeing with his three children. After a couple of months, they captured him and took him to Uspantán. And Victor was jailed in the little town, but his three children were kept in a military bunker. It was called Chajul, this bunker. So my two nieces died of hunger in this military base, and my brother Victor was shot. We still have not found the remains of Victor. We found a file about his cadaver being found with multiple gunshot wounds in the place where people say he was probably shot, but a judge who ruled on his death drew up a death certificate, but it doesn't specify where he was murdered. So we think that my brother Victor is also buried in a mass grave.

And these are the people closest to me who were murdered during the genocide. My father, my mother, my brother Victor, my brother Patrocinio and my sister-in-law Maria were the closest members of my family affected by the genocide.

And this is why I think that the conviction of Ríos Montt may provide an opportunity to close a chapter of our lives, a chapter of profound pain and a chapter that closes and allows us to begin a new relationship amongst Guatemalans, because during the genocide, we felt so alone, we felt powerless, and we felt that nobody had our back. But now a court has convicted Ríos Montt of genocide. So, for us, that suffices, that the fact that genocide was committed is recognized means that nobody will ever forget that genocide was committed.

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Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Allan Nairn: After Ríos Montt Verdict, Time for U.S. to Account for Its Role in Guatemalan Genocidehttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/15/allan_nairn_after_ros_montt_verdict
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-15:en/story/e0e71f AMY GOODMAN : As we wrap up, investigative journalist Allan Nairn, the compensation end of the trial, what you feel needs to be done now? You have covered this throughout these decades.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, all of the crimes that Rigoberta Menchú just described were crimes not just of General Ríos Montt, but also of the U.S. government. The U.S. prosecutors in Washington should immediately convene a grand jury with two missions: first, coming to the aid of the Guatemalan attorney general, who has just been ordered by the court to investigate all others involved in Ríos Montt&#8217;s crimes, by releasing all classified U.S. documents about what happened during the slaughter, which U.S. personnel were involved, providing to the Guatemalan attorney general a list of all Guatemalan army officials and security force officials who were on the payroll of the American CIA , and then proceeding to issue indictments against U.S. officials who acted in the role of accessory or accomplice to the crimes for which Ríos Montt has already been convicted.
AMY GOODMAN : And those people, you believe, would include?
ALLAN NAIRN : The top officials of the Reagan administration who made the policy—President Reagan is deceased, but his top aides, including Elliott Abrams and many others, are still alive; the U.S. CIA personnel on the ground who worked within the G2, the military intelligence unit that coordinated the assassinations and disappearances; the U.S. military attachés who worked with the Guatemalan generals to develop this sweep-and-massacre strategy in the mountains. There would be hundreds of U.S. officials who were complicit in this and should be subpoenaed, called before a grand jury and subjected to indictment. And the U.S. should be ready to extradite them to Guatemala to face punishment, if the Guatemalan authorities are able to proceed with this. And General Pérez Molina is one who should be included. And Pérez Molina, himself, was among—
AMY GOODMAN : The president.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes—is among those who was on the CIA payroll.
AMY GOODMAN : We will leave it there. Allan Nairn, investigative journalist, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace laureate, we thank you so much for being with us in Mexico City. AMYGOODMAN: As we wrap up, investigative journalist Allan Nairn, the compensation end of the trial, what you feel needs to be done now? You have covered this throughout these decades.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, all of the crimes that Rigoberta Menchú just described were crimes not just of General Ríos Montt, but also of the U.S. government. The U.S. prosecutors in Washington should immediately convene a grand jury with two missions: first, coming to the aid of the Guatemalan attorney general, who has just been ordered by the court to investigate all others involved in Ríos Montt’s crimes, by releasing all classified U.S. documents about what happened during the slaughter, which U.S. personnel were involved, providing to the Guatemalan attorney general a list of all Guatemalan army officials and security force officials who were on the payroll of the American CIA, and then proceeding to issue indictments against U.S. officials who acted in the role of accessory or accomplice to the crimes for which Ríos Montt has already been convicted.

AMYGOODMAN: And those people, you believe, would include?

ALLANNAIRN: The top officials of the Reagan administration who made the policy—President Reagan is deceased, but his top aides, including Elliott Abrams and many others, are still alive; the U.S. CIA personnel on the ground who worked within the G2, the military intelligence unit that coordinated the assassinations and disappearances; the U.S. military attachés who worked with the Guatemalan generals to develop this sweep-and-massacre strategy in the mountains. There would be hundreds of U.S. officials who were complicit in this and should be subpoenaed, called before a grand jury and subjected to indictment. And the U.S. should be ready to extradite them to Guatemala to face punishment, if the Guatemalan authorities are able to proceed with this. And General Pérez Molina is one who should be included. And Pérez Molina, himself, was among—

AMYGOODMAN: The president.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes—is among those who was on the CIA payroll.

AMYGOODMAN: We will leave it there. Allan Nairn, investigative journalist, Rigoberta Menchú, Nobel Peace laureate, we thank you so much for being with us in Mexico City.

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Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Ríos Montt Guilty of Genocide: Are Guatemalan President Pérez Molina, U.S. Officials Next?http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/13/ros_montt_guilty_of_genocide_are
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-13:en/story/d9a6c0 AMY GOODMAN : In an historic verdict, former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Judge Yassmin Barrios announced the verdict on Friday.
JUDGE YASSMIN BARRIOS : [translated] By unanimous decision, the court declares that the accused, José Efraín Ríos Montt, is responsible as the author of the crime of genocide. He is responsible as the author of the crimes against humanity committed against the life and integrity of the civilian residents of the villages and hamlets located in Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul. Immediate detention is ordered in order to assure the result of this court process and because of the nature of the crimes committed for which he has been condemned. I hereby order he enter prison directly.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty of overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala&#8217;s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. Over the past two months, nearly a hundred witnesses testified during the trial, describing massacres, torture and rape by state forces.
Also on trial was General José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, Ríos Montt&#8217;s head of intelligence. He was found not guilty of the same charges.
Ríos Montt becomes the first former head of state to be found guilty of genocide in his or her own country. Ríos Montt was a close ally of the United States. Former President Ronald Reagan once called him, quote, &quot;a man of great personal integrity.&quot;
After the verdict, Judge Barrios ordered the attorney general to launch an immediate investigation of &quot;all others&quot; connected to the crimes.
JUDGE YASSMIN BARRIOS : [translated] In continuation of the investigation on the part of the public ministry, the tribunal orders the public ministry to continue the investigation against more people who could have participated in the acts which are being judged.
AMY GOODMAN : The Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, who attended the trial, said there are others who should be tried for war crimes.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] We are using the universal law. In other words, each person has inherent rights, and therefore it is a farce to say that if one is judged, all will be judged. We are not all. We are not things. If someone else is guilty of a crime, he is welcome to come and sit among the accused.
AMY GOODMAN : One former general implicated in abuses during the trial was Guatemala&#8217;s current president, Otto Pérez Molina. In the early 1980s, Pérez Molina was a military field commander in the northwest highlands, the Ixil region where the genocide occurred. At the time, he was operating under the alias &quot;Major Tito Arias.&quot; During the trial, one former army officer accused him of participating in executions.
To talk more about the historic trial and the significance of the verdict and sentence, we go to Guatemala City, where we&#8217;re joined by investigative reporter Allan Nairn, who covered the trial and attended it in Guatemala and has covered Guatemala extensively in the 1980s.
Allan Nairn, welcome back to Democracy Now! The significance of the verdict and the 80-year sentence?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, this was a breakthrough for the idea of enforcing the murder laws, a breakthrough for indigenous people against racism and for human civilization, because you can&#8217;t really claim to be civilized unless you can enforce the law against the most basic taboo: murder. And when the murders are committed by people at the top, usually they get away with it. Even in recent years, when there&#8217;s been some progress internationally, through institutions like the International Criminal Court, in prosecuting former heads of state, generals, for atrocities, almost always the only ones who get prosecuted are those who have lost the power struggle, those who no longer hold onto the reins of power or are no longer backed by the elites. But this case was different. In this case, a conviction was obtained against a general who represented the elite that triumphed, the military and the oligarchs who were responsible for perhaps up to a quarter million civilian murders, especially in the 1980s. Those are the people who still rule Guatemala. Yet, one of their number, General Ríos Montt, has now been convicted, because this was a prosecution that was initiated from below. And I don&#8217;t know of a case where that&#8217;s ever been done before. And this could be the beginning of something very big. I think this will be remembered for 500 years.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about what Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of, what exactly he did?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, he was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Ríos Montt ordered basically a program of extermination against civilians in the northwest highlands. That&#8217;s the area where the Mayan population of Guatemala is concentrated. They make up now, today, about half of the population of the country. And they formed—they were the part of the population that was most resistant to the rule of the army and to the rule of the oligarchy. They were pushing for land reform. They were pushing for rights to be recognized as equal citizens, which was something that, to this day, the Guatemalan oligarchy does not want to concede. And there was also a guerrilla movement that arose in the highlands.
And the Guatemalan army used a strategy of massacre. They would wipe out villages that did not submit to army rule. And the soldiers at the time described to me how they would conduct interrogations where they ask, &quot;Who here gives food to the guerrillas? Who here criticizes the government?&quot; And if they didn&#8217;t tell them what they wanted to hear, they would strangle them to death, or they would slit their throats. If the people being questioned were women and they were pregnant, they would slit them open with machetes. They would make people dig mass graves. They would then make them watch as they shot their neighbors in the head, in the face, in the back of the skull. And this just happened in village after village after village.
And it wasn&#8217;t an armed confrontation, because the villagers were unarmed. The soldiers were armed with American and Israeli weapons. The villagers were not. It was straight-up murder. It was part of a strategy that had been developed in conjunction with the U.S. In fact, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala at the time, Colonel George Maynes, told me that this village—that he, himself, had helped develop this village sweep tactic. There was a U.S. trainer there, American Green Beret, who was training the military, and this is, in his words, how to destroy towns. And that&#8217;s what they did. And now Ríos Montt has been convicted for it.
AMY GOODMAN : Allan Nairn, can you describe the scene in the courtroom, from the point where the judge announced the verdict and the sentence and what happened in the courtroom and with Ríos Montt next?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, after the sentence, at one point, it looked like Ríos Montt was actually trying to flee the courtroom. It looked like his lawyers were trying to ease him out the door. And the judge started calling for security to stop Ríos Montt before he could sneak out the door.
The people in the audience started singing hymns. They started chanting, &quot;Justice! Justice! Justice!&quot; They chanted, &quot;Yassmin! Yassmin!&quot; That&#8217;s the name of the judge, Judge Barrios, who delivered the verdict. The Ixil people in the audience, many of whom had been survivors of these atrocities, who had risked their lives and come to Guatemala City to be witnesses in the trial, they stood up, and they put their arms across their—crossed their arms across the chest in the traditional way of saying thanks, and they all gave a slight bow in unison to pay tribute to the court.
The supporters of Ríos Montt, his family and the former military, some of them at certain points started shouting. They actually seemed most upset when the judge said that Ríos Montt would have to pay money reparations for his crimes. And, in fact, this morning there&#8217;s going to be a hearing on the reparations.
It took the—it took about 45 minutes for the prison police, who were supposed to drag Ríos Montt away, to get into the room. When they came in, I happened to be standing next to the door that they entered, and I asked, &quot;Are you the guys who are supposed to take away Ríos Montt?&quot; And you could see that they were extremely nervous. They were carrying long rifles. But, I mean, this is such an event that this is something they&#8217;ll be telling their grandchildren about.
AMY GOODMAN : And how did they take him out, after he tried to leave with his lawyers before they got there?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, there was a huge swarm of press. He was taken out, and at one point, when he was being put into the police vehicle, you could see that he was being held by the scruff of his neck by the police who were taking him away to prison.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break and then come back to talk about a very interesting CNN interview with the current president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, because that&#8217;s the question everyone is asking now: Does this point the finger at him, he who enjoys immunity while he is president of Guatemala? We&#8217;re speaking with investigative journalist Allan Nairn in Guatemala City, attended the trial of Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, where he sits today. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN : We continue our discussion about the historic verdict against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, found guilty Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years in prison. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Guatemala&#8217;s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was interviewed on CNN en Español, Spanish CNN . The host, Fernando del Rincón, asked the president about his time, Otto Pérez Molina&#8217;s time, as a military commander, but the line mysteriously cut off right after he asked the question.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: [translated] In September 1982, Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist, had documentation where Major Tito Arias appeared in a video in which he said, quote, &quot;All the families,&quot; referencing to the families in the zone, &quot;are with the guerrillas.&quot; That&#8217;s what you said in September 1982 in the video in an interview with Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist from the United States, who, for certain, was there to be questioned in this process against Ríos Montt.
Let&#8217;s see if we&#8217;ll return with the president, to see if we&#8217;ll hear his response to that.
AMY GOODMAN : CNN host Fernando del Rincón returned to the question when the satellite was restored later in the interview.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: [translated] In 1982, you appear in a video of Allan Nairn&#8217;s, which you have confirmed that you appeared, then with the name Major Tito Arias, where you say, &quot;All the families are with the guerrillas.&quot; What did you mean by that?
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Look, this is another case where a phrase is taken out of context of what we were talking about. I don&#8217;t think the thing is like that, Fernando.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: [translated] No one is taking anything out of context. It is a video where it is a declaration you made.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] It must be raised. Of course you were taking it out of context. I can tell you here now. If you want, I can explain. In 1982—and you can come here to verify it everywhere—the faction of the guerrillas that was called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor in that area involved in entire families, without respecting their ages, from the elderly to the smallest children. They were given pseudonyms. They took over the local power. They built what they called &quot;irregular local forces.&quot; They built what they called the &quot;clandestine local committee.&quot; The plan was to burn. Better said, it wasn&#8217;t just a plan; they actually did burn the entire municipalities, in order to—
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: [translated] Mr. President, Mr. President, I must interrupt you.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] That was the context in which we were living.
AMY GOODMAN : That is Guatemala&#8217;s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, being interviewed by CNN en Español host Fernando del Rincón. We&#8217;re joined by investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who Rincón was referring to in his questioning of Pérez Molina. You interviewed the Guatemalan president, Pérez Molina, when he was known as Tito in the highlands, Allan—that&#8217;s what he&#8217;s referring to—more than two decades ago. Explain the significance of this line of questioning and what Pérez Molina&#8217;s role was at the time that Ríos Montt has now been convicted of crimes against humanity for.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, now this—now that Ríos Montt has been convicted for the actions that the Guatemalan army took in the highlands, the next logical step is to look at those who were implementing the plan of Ríos Montt. And the field commander on the ground at that time in the Ixil region was Pérez Molina, who is now the president. With the ruling of the judge, this is more than just a logical conclusion that Pérez Molina should be investigated. It&#8217;s now a legal mandate from the court, because the court said that the attorney general of Guatemala is ordered to investigate everyone who could have been involved in the crimes for which Ríos Montt was convicted.
When I met Pérez Molina in &#39;82, his troops were in the midst of a series of massacres, and the troops described how they would go into villages and execute civilians and torture civilians. At one point, one of the discussions with Pérez Molina took place as we were standing over the bodies of four guerrillas who the—his troops had captured. One of the soldiers said they had turned them over to Pérez Molina for interrogation after one of them had set off a grenade. The soldier said, &quot;Well, they didn&#39;t want to say anything in their interrogation.&quot; Another soldier told me that they, the military, had in fact finished those troops off. So, Pérez Molina is a definite logical target for criminal investigation, although at this moment, as president, he still enjoys legal immunity. But that lapses as soon as he leaves an official position.
AMY GOODMAN : CNN host Fernando del Rincón also asked President Otto Pérez Molina if he still denies there was a genocide after Friday&#8217;s verdict.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Well, Fernando, I was speaking my personal opinion. And personally, I do not want this. And I said it also when I said that there was no genocide in Guatemala. And I repeat that now. Now, after there has been a judgment, which was in a lower court, today&#8217;s ruling is not as firm. We are respectful of what justice declares, and we will continue being respectful.
What I believe to be of value here, first of all, is that in Guatemala things are taking place that have never happened before. And that&#8217;s important. That is, a head of state today in a lower court having been convicted of a crime of this magnitude, which is the crime of genocide, is something that was unthinkable just 10 years ago here in Guatemala. Today what we are seeing is that justice can be exercised, justice can advance and move forward.
Now, this sentence is not so firm. The ruling shall be final when the appellate process runs its course. And I imagine those defending General Ríos will pursue these options, as he, himself, stated today after he saw the sentence and said he will appeal the sentence that was declared today.
AMY GOODMAN : CNN host Fernando del Rincón pressied President Molina further, asking him if he would go against the Guatemalan justice system and continue to deny that there&#8217;s a genocide.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Well, that&#8217;s hypothetical, Fernando. What you are telling me is an assumption. What is missing here is that the higher courts declare on the matter. I am not a part of the defense of General Ríos, and I will not be part of the official defense of General Ríos. In any case, as an executive, as president of the country, what is my responsibility is to be respectful. And it is what I also ask of all Guatemalans, that we be law-abiding. Here, we have to respect and we need to strengthen all the levels of justice. And what I have always said, we want justice to be served, but we want it to be a justice that is not biased to one side nor the other, because it would cease to be justice. And then what would happen is that Guatemalans would lose rather than be strengthened. They would lose confidence in the justice system. I&#8217;m not going to issue an opinion at this time.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina, being interviewed by CNN . Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, your response?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, at one point, it sounds like Pérez Molina is trying to take credit for the trial. And the trial happened against his will. And, in fact, just a few weeks ago, he intervened behind the scenes to help kill the trial, and it was only revived after an intense backlash from the Guatemalan public and also international pressure. This morning&#8217;s Wall Street Journal carries a piece that has additional evidence citing various residents of the areas that Pérez Molina commanded also talking about him committing atrocities.
One of the remarks that Pérez Molina made in response to the verdict against Ríos Montt—he was echoing the comments of the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents the U.S. corporations in Guatemala—was to say that this verdict will discourage foreign investment in Guatemala. It&#8217;s a very revealing comment, because foreign companies, when they come into a country and are looking to invest, they want some laws to be enforced, like the laws on contracts, and they want other laws not to be enforced, like the labor laws and the laws which stop them from murdering their employees if they try to organize unions. In the &#8217;80s, the leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce described to me how they would sometimes turn over names of troublesome workers to the security forces, and they would then disappear or be assassinated. Fred Sherwood was one of the Chamber of Commerce leaders who described that. And now, with this verdict, it seems that Pérez Molina and the corporate leaders and the elites in Guatemala, in general, are worried that they may have a harder time killing off workers and organizers when they need to.
And it&#8217;s especially relevant right now because there&#8217;s a huge conflict in Guatemala about mining. American and Canadian mining companies are being brought in by the Pérez Molina government to exploit silver and other minerals. The local communities are resisting. Community organizers have been killed. There was a clash in which a police officer was killed. So Pérez Molina has imposed a state of siege in various parts of the country. And just the other day, the local press printed a wiretap transcript of the head of security at one of these mines, in this case the San Rafael mining operation, where the security chief says to his men, regarding demonstrators who were outside the mine, he says, &quot;Goddamn dogs, they do not—they do not understand that the mine generates jobs. We must eliminate these animal pieces of [bleep]. We cannot allow people to establish resistance. Kill those sons of [bleep].&quot; And the security people later opened fire. This is the way foreign companies operate, not just in Guatemala, but around the world. I mean, it&#8217;s this kind of non-enforcement of law that made possible the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a hundred workers. And now they&#8217;re worried in Guatemala—
AMY GOODMAN : A thousand.
ALLAN NAIRN : Oh, I&#8217;m sorry, over a thousand workers—that this Ríos Montt case could also set a precedent for just starting to enforce the murder laws. And that can make their life a little more difficult. That can raise their labor costs. It has very serious implications for them.
And another aspect of this is that there&#8217;s going to be a fierce counterreaction against this verdict this week from the oligarchs, from the former military. They&#8217;re putting things out into the public calling Judge Barrios a dirty guerrilla, a hysterical Nazi. They have people following her around town with video cameras to try to imply that she&#8217;s not behaving in a proper manner for a judge. They&#8217;re going to try to get the courts, which have—other courts, which have traditionally been tools of the oligarchy and the military, to nullify the verdict against Ríos Montt. This battle is far from over.
AMY GOODMAN : Allan, there are three remarkable, prominent women who have—who are part of this verdict, who have helped to make it happen. One is the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, one of—who brought suit, that has led to this trial. One is the attorney general, the first woman attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz. And then there is Judge Barrios, the judge in this case. Can you talk about these women?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, it was Rigoberta Menchú who helped to get this whole process started years ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. That helped produce a criminal court case in Spain, where—in the Audiencia Nacional, where the Spanish courts indicted and tried to extradite Guatemalan generals and former officials to Spain. I testified in that trial. And one of the survivors of the massacres who testified in that trial mentioned that Pérez Molina—this was an aside at the trial, because there were so many officers who were implicated—that Pérez Molina had been involved in this man&#8217;s torture.
One of the reasons that this case against Ríos Montt has been able to go forward is because the current attorney general, Paz y Paz, is a person of great integrity and has allowed it to go forward, obviously against the wishes of Pérez Molina and the oligarchy.
And Judge Barrios was the one who was—who was directly on the lines. She ran the trial. She was the one who had to deliver the verdict. As she left the courthouse every night, you could see her wearing a bulletproof vest. The judges and prosecutors involved in the case received death threats. In one case, a threat against a prosecutor, the person delivering the threat put a pistol on the table and said, &quot;I know where your children are.&quot; It takes a lot of courage to push a case like this. And there are enough people in Guatemala who have been willing to stand up that it&#8217;s been able to go forward, but they&#8217;re doing so at considerable risk.
And just to give you an idea of the kind of environment they&#8217;re operating in, there&#8217;s a piece that just came out in Plaza Pública , one of the—kind of the leading political magazine in Guatemala, where they interview the families of the military, who have been protesting against the Ríos Montt trial. These are young people, now extremely rich because of all their money their parents stole in the military. And one of the topics that they talk about in this interview is the rape charges against the generals and colonels, because witness after witness talked about how indigenous women would be raped in the course of these massacre operations. And one of the military family men says that, &quot;Well, yes, these rapes—some of these rapes may have happened, but they didn&#8217;t happen as a rule.&quot; And he then defends the military men by saying he doesn&#8217;t think that they would systematically rape the indigenous women, and he then uses language so vile that I can&#8217;t repeat it on the air. But the essence of his argument is that—his argument is not that they wouldn&#8217;t have done it because it would be wrong to rape or because it&#8217;s against the law to rape or because these military men have honor or because it&#8217;s indecent to rape; his point was that they wouldn&#8217;t have committed these mass rapes because they wouldn&#8217;t have—because of personal characteristics of the indigenous women, they would not have found them desirable. But he expresses it in the most disgusting language you can imagine. This is the oligarchy that has now been—and the military, that has now been stung by this verdict and is itching for payback.
And one final legal point I should make, the mandate that the judge gave, the order to the attorney general, Judge Barrios&#8217;s order to the attorney general, Paz y Paz, to further investigate everyone involved in Ríos Montt&#8217;s crimes, that could encompass U.S. officials, because the U.S. military attachés in Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the G2 military intelligence unit, the policy-making officials back in Washington, people like Elliott Abrams and the other high officials of the Reagan administration, they were direct accessories to and accomplices to the Guatemalan military. There were supplying money, weapons, political support, intelligence. They, under the law—under international and Guatemalan law, they could be charged. The courts and the attorney general could have right to seek their extradition from the U.S. Also, in the investigation process, they could subpoena U.S. documents, because there would be extensive reports and National Security Agency intercepts of Guatemalan army communications from that period, and there would also be still-classified reports on exactly what the CIA and the DIA and the White House and the State Department were doing with Ríos Montt and with the commanders in the field, people like, well, before Ríos Montt, General Benedicto Lucas García, afterward Pérez Molina. So, both President Pérez Molina and the U.S. are now potential targets for criminal investigation for these crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : Allan Nairn, we will leave it there for now, investigative journalist on the ground in Guatemala City, and end with a clip of Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was there through the trial, speaking at the beginning of the genocide trial of Ríos Montt.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] It&#8217;s a very big day for Guatemala. It&#8217;s a very big day for those of us who have defended our lives in difficult circumstances, very painful circumstances of great isolation, of exile. It looks like our period of pain is ending, because we hope that from now on we will be accepted by Guatemalan society, in our polarized society, the society that carries the burden of past genocide on their backs.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The former dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, has been sentenced to 80 years in prison. He was taken to prison after he was found guilty on Friday. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. We&#8217;ll link to Allan Nairn&#8217;s blog at allannairn.org . That&#8217;s A-L-L-A-N-N-A-I-R-N.org. And you can see all of our coverage of this trial and our interviews on Guatemala at democracynow.org.
This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a minute looking at the latest climate change news. We&#8217;ll be speaking with climatologist Michael Mann. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: In an historic verdict, former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Judge Yassmin Barrios announced the verdict on Friday.

JUDGEYASSMINBARRIOS: [translated] By unanimous decision, the court declares that the accused, José Efraín Ríos Montt, is responsible as the author of the crime of genocide. He is responsible as the author of the crimes against humanity committed against the life and integrity of the civilian residents of the villages and hamlets located in Santa Maria Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul. Immediate detention is ordered in order to assure the result of this court process and because of the nature of the crimes committed for which he has been condemned. I hereby order he enter prison directly.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty of overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. Over the past two months, nearly a hundred witnesses testified during the trial, describing massacres, torture and rape by state forces.

Also on trial was General José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, Ríos Montt’s head of intelligence. He was found not guilty of the same charges.

Ríos Montt becomes the first former head of state to be found guilty of genocide in his or her own country. Ríos Montt was a close ally of the United States. Former President Ronald Reagan once called him, quote, "a man of great personal integrity."

After the verdict, Judge Barrios ordered the attorney general to launch an immediate investigation of "all others" connected to the crimes.

JUDGEYASSMINBARRIOS: [translated] In continuation of the investigation on the part of the public ministry, the tribunal orders the public ministry to continue the investigation against more people who could have participated in the acts which are being judged.

AMYGOODMAN: The Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, who attended the trial, said there are others who should be tried for war crimes.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] We are using the universal law. In other words, each person has inherent rights, and therefore it is a farce to say that if one is judged, all will be judged. We are not all. We are not things. If someone else is guilty of a crime, he is welcome to come and sit among the accused.

AMYGOODMAN: One former general implicated in abuses during the trial was Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina. In the early 1980s, Pérez Molina was a military field commander in the northwest highlands, the Ixil region where the genocide occurred. At the time, he was operating under the alias "Major Tito Arias." During the trial, one former army officer accused him of participating in executions.

To talk more about the historic trial and the significance of the verdict and sentence, we go to Guatemala City, where we’re joined by investigative reporter Allan Nairn, who covered the trial and attended it in Guatemala and has covered Guatemala extensively in the 1980s.

Allan Nairn, welcome back to Democracy Now! The significance of the verdict and the 80-year sentence?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, this was a breakthrough for the idea of enforcing the murder laws, a breakthrough for indigenous people against racism and for human civilization, because you can’t really claim to be civilized unless you can enforce the law against the most basic taboo: murder. And when the murders are committed by people at the top, usually they get away with it. Even in recent years, when there’s been some progress internationally, through institutions like the International Criminal Court, in prosecuting former heads of state, generals, for atrocities, almost always the only ones who get prosecuted are those who have lost the power struggle, those who no longer hold onto the reins of power or are no longer backed by the elites. But this case was different. In this case, a conviction was obtained against a general who represented the elite that triumphed, the military and the oligarchs who were responsible for perhaps up to a quarter million civilian murders, especially in the 1980s. Those are the people who still rule Guatemala. Yet, one of their number, General Ríos Montt, has now been convicted, because this was a prosecution that was initiated from below. And I don’t know of a case where that’s ever been done before. And this could be the beginning of something very big. I think this will be remembered for 500 years.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about what Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of, what exactly he did?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, he was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Ríos Montt ordered basically a program of extermination against civilians in the northwest highlands. That’s the area where the Mayan population of Guatemala is concentrated. They make up now, today, about half of the population of the country. And they formed—they were the part of the population that was most resistant to the rule of the army and to the rule of the oligarchy. They were pushing for land reform. They were pushing for rights to be recognized as equal citizens, which was something that, to this day, the Guatemalan oligarchy does not want to concede. And there was also a guerrilla movement that arose in the highlands.

And the Guatemalan army used a strategy of massacre. They would wipe out villages that did not submit to army rule. And the soldiers at the time described to me how they would conduct interrogations where they ask, "Who here gives food to the guerrillas? Who here criticizes the government?" And if they didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they would strangle them to death, or they would slit their throats. If the people being questioned were women and they were pregnant, they would slit them open with machetes. They would make people dig mass graves. They would then make them watch as they shot their neighbors in the head, in the face, in the back of the skull. And this just happened in village after village after village.

And it wasn’t an armed confrontation, because the villagers were unarmed. The soldiers were armed with American and Israeli weapons. The villagers were not. It was straight-up murder. It was part of a strategy that had been developed in conjunction with the U.S. In fact, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala at the time, Colonel George Maynes, told me that this village—that he, himself, had helped develop this village sweep tactic. There was a U.S. trainer there, American Green Beret, who was training the military, and this is, in his words, how to destroy towns. And that’s what they did. And now Ríos Montt has been convicted for it.

AMYGOODMAN: Allan Nairn, can you describe the scene in the courtroom, from the point where the judge announced the verdict and the sentence and what happened in the courtroom and with Ríos Montt next?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, after the sentence, at one point, it looked like Ríos Montt was actually trying to flee the courtroom. It looked like his lawyers were trying to ease him out the door. And the judge started calling for security to stop Ríos Montt before he could sneak out the door.

The people in the audience started singing hymns. They started chanting, "Justice! Justice! Justice!" They chanted, "Yassmin! Yassmin!" That’s the name of the judge, Judge Barrios, who delivered the verdict. The Ixil people in the audience, many of whom had been survivors of these atrocities, who had risked their lives and come to Guatemala City to be witnesses in the trial, they stood up, and they put their arms across their—crossed their arms across the chest in the traditional way of saying thanks, and they all gave a slight bow in unison to pay tribute to the court.

The supporters of Ríos Montt, his family and the former military, some of them at certain points started shouting. They actually seemed most upset when the judge said that Ríos Montt would have to pay money reparations for his crimes. And, in fact, this morning there’s going to be a hearing on the reparations.

It took the—it took about 45 minutes for the prison police, who were supposed to drag Ríos Montt away, to get into the room. When they came in, I happened to be standing next to the door that they entered, and I asked, "Are you the guys who are supposed to take away Ríos Montt?" And you could see that they were extremely nervous. They were carrying long rifles. But, I mean, this is such an event that this is something they’ll be telling their grandchildren about.

AMYGOODMAN: And how did they take him out, after he tried to leave with his lawyers before they got there?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, there was a huge swarm of press. He was taken out, and at one point, when he was being put into the police vehicle, you could see that he was being held by the scruff of his neck by the police who were taking him away to prison.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to talk about a very interesting CNN interview with the current president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, because that’s the question everyone is asking now: Does this point the finger at him, he who enjoys immunity while he is president of Guatemala? We’re speaking with investigative journalist Allan Nairn in Guatemala City, attended the trial of Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, where he sits today. Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We continue our discussion about the historic verdict against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, found guilty Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years in prison. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was interviewed on CNN en Español, Spanish CNN. The host, Fernando del Rincón, asked the president about his time, Otto Pérez Molina’s time, as a military commander, but the line mysteriously cut off right after he asked the question.

FERNANDODEL RINCÓN: [translated] In September 1982, Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist, had documentation where Major Tito Arias appeared in a video in which he said, quote, "All the families," referencing to the families in the zone, "are with the guerrillas." That’s what you said in September 1982 in the video in an interview with Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist from the United States, who, for certain, was there to be questioned in this process against Ríos Montt.

Let’s see if we’ll return with the president, to see if we’ll hear his response to that.

AMYGOODMAN:CNN host Fernando del Rincón returned to the question when the satellite was restored later in the interview.

FERNANDODEL RINCÓN: [translated] In 1982, you appear in a video of Allan Nairn’s, which you have confirmed that you appeared, then with the name Major Tito Arias, where you say, "All the families are with the guerrillas." What did you mean by that?

PRESIDENTOTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Look, this is another case where a phrase is taken out of context of what we were talking about. I don’t think the thing is like that, Fernando.

FERNANDODEL RINCÓN: [translated] No one is taking anything out of context. It is a video where it is a declaration you made.

PRESIDENTOTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] It must be raised. Of course you were taking it out of context. I can tell you here now. If you want, I can explain. In 1982—and you can come here to verify it everywhere—the faction of the guerrillas that was called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor in that area involved in entire families, without respecting their ages, from the elderly to the smallest children. They were given pseudonyms. They took over the local power. They built what they called "irregular local forces." They built what they called the "clandestine local committee." The plan was to burn. Better said, it wasn’t just a plan; they actually did burn the entire municipalities, in order to—

PRESIDENTOTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] That was the context in which we were living.

AMYGOODMAN: That is Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, being interviewed by CNN en Español host Fernando del Rincón. We’re joined by investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who Rincón was referring to in his questioning of Pérez Molina. You interviewed the Guatemalan president, Pérez Molina, when he was known as Tito in the highlands, Allan—that’s what he’s referring to—more than two decades ago. Explain the significance of this line of questioning and what Pérez Molina’s role was at the time that Ríos Montt has now been convicted of crimes against humanity for.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, now this—now that Ríos Montt has been convicted for the actions that the Guatemalan army took in the highlands, the next logical step is to look at those who were implementing the plan of Ríos Montt. And the field commander on the ground at that time in the Ixil region was Pérez Molina, who is now the president. With the ruling of the judge, this is more than just a logical conclusion that Pérez Molina should be investigated. It’s now a legal mandate from the court, because the court said that the attorney general of Guatemala is ordered to investigate everyone who could have been involved in the crimes for which Ríos Montt was convicted.

When I met Pérez Molina in '82, his troops were in the midst of a series of massacres, and the troops described how they would go into villages and execute civilians and torture civilians. At one point, one of the discussions with Pérez Molina took place as we were standing over the bodies of four guerrillas who the—his troops had captured. One of the soldiers said they had turned them over to Pérez Molina for interrogation after one of them had set off a grenade. The soldier said, "Well, they didn't want to say anything in their interrogation." Another soldier told me that they, the military, had in fact finished those troops off. So, Pérez Molina is a definite logical target for criminal investigation, although at this moment, as president, he still enjoys legal immunity. But that lapses as soon as he leaves an official position.

AMYGOODMAN:CNN host Fernando del Rincón also asked President Otto Pérez Molina if he still denies there was a genocide after Friday’s verdict.

PRESIDENTOTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Well, Fernando, I was speaking my personal opinion. And personally, I do not want this. And I said it also when I said that there was no genocide in Guatemala. And I repeat that now. Now, after there has been a judgment, which was in a lower court, today’s ruling is not as firm. We are respectful of what justice declares, and we will continue being respectful.

What I believe to be of value here, first of all, is that in Guatemala things are taking place that have never happened before. And that’s important. That is, a head of state today in a lower court having been convicted of a crime of this magnitude, which is the crime of genocide, is something that was unthinkable just 10 years ago here in Guatemala. Today what we are seeing is that justice can be exercised, justice can advance and move forward.

Now, this sentence is not so firm. The ruling shall be final when the appellate process runs its course. And I imagine those defending General Ríos will pursue these options, as he, himself, stated today after he saw the sentence and said he will appeal the sentence that was declared today.

AMYGOODMAN:CNN host Fernando del Rincón pressied President Molina further, asking him if he would go against the Guatemalan justice system and continue to deny that there’s a genocide.

PRESIDENTOTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Well, that’s hypothetical, Fernando. What you are telling me is an assumption. What is missing here is that the higher courts declare on the matter. I am not a part of the defense of General Ríos, and I will not be part of the official defense of General Ríos. In any case, as an executive, as president of the country, what is my responsibility is to be respectful. And it is what I also ask of all Guatemalans, that we be law-abiding. Here, we have to respect and we need to strengthen all the levels of justice. And what I have always said, we want justice to be served, but we want it to be a justice that is not biased to one side nor the other, because it would cease to be justice. And then what would happen is that Guatemalans would lose rather than be strengthened. They would lose confidence in the justice system. I’m not going to issue an opinion at this time.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, at one point, it sounds like Pérez Molina is trying to take credit for the trial. And the trial happened against his will. And, in fact, just a few weeks ago, he intervened behind the scenes to help kill the trial, and it was only revived after an intense backlash from the Guatemalan public and also international pressure. This morning’s Wall Street Journal carries a piece that has additional evidence citing various residents of the areas that Pérez Molina commanded also talking about him committing atrocities.

One of the remarks that Pérez Molina made in response to the verdict against Ríos Montt—he was echoing the comments of the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents the U.S. corporations in Guatemala—was to say that this verdict will discourage foreign investment in Guatemala. It’s a very revealing comment, because foreign companies, when they come into a country and are looking to invest, they want some laws to be enforced, like the laws on contracts, and they want other laws not to be enforced, like the labor laws and the laws which stop them from murdering their employees if they try to organize unions. In the ’80s, the leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce described to me how they would sometimes turn over names of troublesome workers to the security forces, and they would then disappear or be assassinated. Fred Sherwood was one of the Chamber of Commerce leaders who described that. And now, with this verdict, it seems that Pérez Molina and the corporate leaders and the elites in Guatemala, in general, are worried that they may have a harder time killing off workers and organizers when they need to.

And it’s especially relevant right now because there’s a huge conflict in Guatemala about mining. American and Canadian mining companies are being brought in by the Pérez Molina government to exploit silver and other minerals. The local communities are resisting. Community organizers have been killed. There was a clash in which a police officer was killed. So Pérez Molina has imposed a state of siege in various parts of the country. And just the other day, the local press printed a wiretap transcript of the head of security at one of these mines, in this case the San Rafael mining operation, where the security chief says to his men, regarding demonstrators who were outside the mine, he says, "Goddamn dogs, they do not—they do not understand that the mine generates jobs. We must eliminate these animal pieces of [bleep]. We cannot allow people to establish resistance. Kill those sons of [bleep]." And the security people later opened fire. This is the way foreign companies operate, not just in Guatemala, but around the world. I mean, it’s this kind of non-enforcement of law that made possible the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a hundred workers. And now they’re worried in Guatemala—

AMYGOODMAN: A thousand.

ALLANNAIRN: Oh, I’m sorry, over a thousand workers—that this Ríos Montt case could also set a precedent for just starting to enforce the murder laws. And that can make their life a little more difficult. That can raise their labor costs. It has very serious implications for them.

And another aspect of this is that there’s going to be a fierce counterreaction against this verdict this week from the oligarchs, from the former military. They’re putting things out into the public calling Judge Barrios a dirty guerrilla, a hysterical Nazi. They have people following her around town with video cameras to try to imply that she’s not behaving in a proper manner for a judge. They’re going to try to get the courts, which have—other courts, which have traditionally been tools of the oligarchy and the military, to nullify the verdict against Ríos Montt. This battle is far from over.

AMYGOODMAN: Allan, there are three remarkable, prominent women who have—who are part of this verdict, who have helped to make it happen. One is the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, one of—who brought suit, that has led to this trial. One is the attorney general, the first woman attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz. And then there is Judge Barrios, the judge in this case. Can you talk about these women?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, it was Rigoberta Menchú who helped to get this whole process started years ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. That helped produce a criminal court case in Spain, where—in the Audiencia Nacional, where the Spanish courts indicted and tried to extradite Guatemalan generals and former officials to Spain. I testified in that trial. And one of the survivors of the massacres who testified in that trial mentioned that Pérez Molina—this was an aside at the trial, because there were so many officers who were implicated—that Pérez Molina had been involved in this man’s torture.

One of the reasons that this case against Ríos Montt has been able to go forward is because the current attorney general, Paz y Paz, is a person of great integrity and has allowed it to go forward, obviously against the wishes of Pérez Molina and the oligarchy.

And Judge Barrios was the one who was—who was directly on the lines. She ran the trial. She was the one who had to deliver the verdict. As she left the courthouse every night, you could see her wearing a bulletproof vest. The judges and prosecutors involved in the case received death threats. In one case, a threat against a prosecutor, the person delivering the threat put a pistol on the table and said, "I know where your children are." It takes a lot of courage to push a case like this. And there are enough people in Guatemala who have been willing to stand up that it’s been able to go forward, but they’re doing so at considerable risk.

And just to give you an idea of the kind of environment they’re operating in, there’s a piece that just came out in Plaza Pública, one of the—kind of the leading political magazine in Guatemala, where they interview the families of the military, who have been protesting against the Ríos Montt trial. These are young people, now extremely rich because of all their money their parents stole in the military. And one of the topics that they talk about in this interview is the rape charges against the generals and colonels, because witness after witness talked about how indigenous women would be raped in the course of these massacre operations. And one of the military family men says that, "Well, yes, these rapes—some of these rapes may have happened, but they didn’t happen as a rule." And he then defends the military men by saying he doesn’t think that they would systematically rape the indigenous women, and he then uses language so vile that I can’t repeat it on the air. But the essence of his argument is that—his argument is not that they wouldn’t have done it because it would be wrong to rape or because it’s against the law to rape or because these military men have honor or because it’s indecent to rape; his point was that they wouldn’t have committed these mass rapes because they wouldn’t have—because of personal characteristics of the indigenous women, they would not have found them desirable. But he expresses it in the most disgusting language you can imagine. This is the oligarchy that has now been—and the military, that has now been stung by this verdict and is itching for payback.

And one final legal point I should make, the mandate that the judge gave, the order to the attorney general, Judge Barrios’s order to the attorney general, Paz y Paz, to further investigate everyone involved in Ríos Montt’s crimes, that could encompass U.S. officials, because the U.S. military attachés in Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the G2 military intelligence unit, the policy-making officials back in Washington, people like Elliott Abrams and the other high officials of the Reagan administration, they were direct accessories to and accomplices to the Guatemalan military. There were supplying money, weapons, political support, intelligence. They, under the law—under international and Guatemalan law, they could be charged. The courts and the attorney general could have right to seek their extradition from the U.S. Also, in the investigation process, they could subpoena U.S. documents, because there would be extensive reports and National Security Agency intercepts of Guatemalan army communications from that period, and there would also be still-classified reports on exactly what the CIA and the DIA and the White House and the State Department were doing with Ríos Montt and with the commanders in the field, people like, well, before Ríos Montt, General Benedicto Lucas García, afterward Pérez Molina. So, both President Pérez Molina and the U.S. are now potential targets for criminal investigation for these crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: Allan Nairn, we will leave it there for now, investigative journalist on the ground in Guatemala City, and end with a clip of Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was there through the trial, speaking at the beginning of the genocide trial of Ríos Montt.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] It’s a very big day for Guatemala. It’s a very big day for those of us who have defended our lives in difficult circumstances, very painful circumstances of great isolation, of exile. It looks like our period of pain is ending, because we hope that from now on we will be accepted by Guatemalan society, in our polarized society, the society that carries the burden of past genocide on their backs.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The former dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, has been sentenced to 80 years in prison. He was taken to prison after he was found guilty on Friday. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll link to Allan Nairn’s blog at allannairn.org. That’s A-L-L-A-N-N-A-I-R-N.org. And you can see all of our coverage of this trial and our interviews on Guatemala at democracynow.org.

This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute looking at the latest climate change news. We’ll be speaking with climatologist Michael Mann. Stay with us.

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Mon, 13 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Breaking: Former U.S.-Backed Guatemalan Dictator Found Guilty of Genocide in Historic Trialhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/5/10/live_verdict_expected_soon_in_guatemalan_genocide_trial
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-10:blog/814c4e Former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide in a historic trial. He was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was sentenced to 50 years in prison for genocide and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity for overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala&#8217;s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. His co-defendant, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, his former head of military intelligence, was found not guilty.
For minute-by-minute coverage of the trial, we have created a Twitter list of journalists and organizations covering the proceedings.
Tweets from @democracynow/rios-montt-trial
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DEMOCRACY NOW ! COVERAGE OF TRIAL
From today: &#39;Despite Evidence of Massacres, Former Guatemalan Dictator Proclaims Innocence at Genocide Trial&#39;
From April 19th: &#39;Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacres&#39;
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Allan Nairn&#8217;s blog
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Live audio stream of trial [when court is in session]
Former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide in a historic trial. He was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Ríos Montt was sentenced to 50 years in prison for genocide and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity for overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. His co-defendant, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, his former head of military intelligence, was found not guilty.

For minute-by-minute coverage of the trial, we have created a Twitter list of journalists and organizations covering the proceedings.

MOREWEBRESOURCES ON RIOSMONTTTRIAL

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Fri, 10 May 2013 15:06:00 -0400Despite Evidence of Massacres, Former Guatemalan Dictator Proclaims Innocence at Genocide Trialhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/10/despite_evidence_of_massacres_former_guatemalan
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-10:en/story/8abdb8 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today&#8217;s show in Guatemala. A verdict is expected as early as today in the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. He is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala&#8217;s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. On Thursday, Ríos Montt testified for the first time during the trial.
EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT : [translated] I never authorized, I never signed, I never proposed, I never ordered that there be any attacks against a race, an ethnic group or any religion. I never did it. And with everything they&#8217;ve said, there has been no proof of evidence of my participation. I presented myself voluntarily to the public ministry to be tried. I didn&#8217;t want anyone to say I committed genocide, because I have never done so, and I have never done it. I have never ordered it, and I never intended it. And I want that to be known. I have never done it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt speaking Thursday at his historic genocide trial. He ended his testimony with these words.
EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT : [translated] I declare myself innocent. I never had the intention or the purpose to destroy any national ethnic group. As head of state, that was one thing. My work as head of state was to take the reins of the country that was on the edge. Guatemala had failed. And forgive me, Your Honor, the guerrillas were at the door of the presidential palace. Thank you, Your Honor.
AMY GOODMAN : During the trial, nearly a hundred prosecution witnesses described massacres, torture and rape committed by Guatemalan state forces.
We&#8217;re joined now by investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He&#8217;s in Guatemala City. He has been attending the trial. In the 1980s, Allan Nairn broke many stories about massacres in Guatemala and the U.S. backing of the dictatorships.
Allan Nairn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe the significance of Ríos Montt testifying yesterday and the trial overall.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, first, it&#8217;s important that the trial was able to go forward. Yesterday, it was still possible that it would be shut down at the last minute. But now, clearly, the political decision has been made to let it go forward, and the only thing that could stop it at this point would be an assassination. The judge in the case, when she leaves the courtroom, she wears a bulletproof vest. She&#8217;s surrounded by security. Army associates have made death threats against judges, prosecutors and witnesses. But unless they carry through and pull the trigger sometime this morning, it looked like—it looks like there&#8217;s going to be a verdict.
And if there is a verdict, and Ríos Montt and his co-defendant, General Rodríguez Sánchez, are convicted of genocide and/or crimes against humanity, it would be a—it would be a step into the—into the future. It would be, I think, in a sense, the beginning of another historical phase, because all over the world, not just in Guatemala but wherever you have guns and wherever you have power, those who have the most guns are allowed to get away with murder. There is no fear of prosecution for a Guatemalan dictator, for a U.S. president. They can do things that would get an ordinary person thrown in jail.
But actions like this, where survivors of the Mayan highland massacres campaigned for three decades, remembering their wives and their husbands who were slit open with machetes and shot in the face and thrown into ditches while they were still alive, the fact that they were able to campaign for decades, and even though their movement was crushed during the slaughters of the &#39;80s, even though the army and the oligarchy to this day retain power in Guatemala, the people they crushed are on the verge of exacting some justice and may be getting a jail sentence against one of the main people responsible for the deaths of—I mean, nobody knows the exact death toll of all the slaughters. Ríos Montt in this case is being charged with just 1,700 murders, but the complete death toll over the years in Guatemala could amount to something like a quarter million. And no one has really been able to do this before. No one has been able to use their domestic courts to put a former leader on trial for genocide. This is the kind of move that would be unthinkable in the United States. You know, standing in the courtroom yesterday, I was trying to imagine what would the scene be like in the U.S. if, say, George W. Bush were called before a criminal court in Texas and put on trial for Iraq. It&#39;s hard to imagine, but here it&#8217;s happening.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Allan, I wanted to ask you about a key aspect of Ríos Montt&#8217;s defense. Now, obviously, he was making a statement, but he was not being subject to cross-examination at all. It was just his statement at the trial. But he appeared to basically be saying, &quot;Look, these lower-level commanders may have done this, but I did not have any involvement, and I did not give the orders.&quot; Yet, in a post that you had this week, you went back over your direct interviews with Ríos Montt back in 1982, where you actually questioned him about what he knew about the killings going on. And I&#8217;m wondering if you could go over some of what he told you back then.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yeah, in May of &#8217;82, a couple months after he had seized power and sent the army sweeping through the northwest highlands, including the Ixil area, as the army was just wiping out one town after another, executing the civilians, I asked Ríos Montt about the civilian killings. And he said, &quot;Look, for each one who is shooting,&quot; meaning for each guerrilla, &quot;there are 10 working behind them,&quot; meaning there are 10 unarmed people working behind them. And then his adviser, Francisco Bianchi, said, &quot;We have to kill Indians, the Ixil people, because they have sold out to subversion.&quot;
Years later, after Ríos Montt was ousted from power, I interviewed him again. And I asked him whether he thought that he should be put on trial for his role in the massacres and whether he should be executed, since he, Ríos Montt, is a big supporter of the death penalty. And when I asked him that, he suddenly leapt up to his feet and shouted. He said, &quot;Yes, try me! Put me against the wall!&quot; But, he said, that if he was going to be put on trial, the Americans should be put on trial with him. He specifically mentioned Ronald Reagan, who was one of his great sponsors.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, during his testimony, Ríos Montt spoke about his relationship with United States officials and suggested that they had a better sense of what was going on in Guatemala than he did at the time. This is a clip from that.
EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT : [translated] I had the opportunity to go to some meetings. One nice one was with Mr. Reagan. We met. He invited me. And we were there in San Pedro Sula. And we were there, and we did not ask for arms. We did not ask for aid. And that was what was most sad. We were cut off in all ways. We did not have any international aid. Guatemala survived with the resources that Guatemalans had. There was no other way to survive. And this was important. The U.S. did not give any type of aid. Nor did we get loans, because we were nearly bankrupt. So we didn&#8217;t have capital or work. And what affected us economically, the millions of dollars were fleeing the region for fear and lack of security, and there was no investment. The Central American market was reduced perhaps some 25 percent.
This is the big picture of the situation, and they could not see this. They could only what they were interested in: the region of Ixil. The Ixil area, we have seen it, feel it, and we did what we had to do. Now I tell you that it did not count with the support of the armed forces. They all got upset with me, because the ones who were about to retire did.
I had the good fortune of not having the friendship of the U.S. ambassador. And so, he would visit me constantly, Your Honor, so that we could have elections and that we could work in one way or the other. And we would say to His Eminence—oh, I don&#8217;t think he was, quote, &quot;Eminence&quot;—we would say to His Excellence, regarding the reports that he had, because he had more reports than we had regarding the nationals—pardon me, no, not with nationals, but those who were paid with American money were involved in the subversion. They had better information than we had. That is a small thing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Allan Nairn, what about this whole issue of what the Americans knew at the time of these killings?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, everybody knew. These massacres were not secret. They were acts of state terrorism where a big part of the point was publicity. When the assassinations were done in the cities, they would often make a point of throwing the bodies in the streets to terrify onlookers. In the massacres in the countryside, the executions would—and torture interrogations would often be carried out in the village square with all the survivors looking on so they would get a lifelong lesson that they would never forget, as they saw their families and their loved ones being strangled and shot in the head. This was all over the newspapers in Guatemala. The Catholic Bishops&#8217; Conference in May of &#39;82, that same month that I had the interview with Ríos Montt where he talked about 10 civilians for every guerrilla, and his aide said they had sold out to subversion, they had to be killed—the Catholic Bishops&#39; Conference issued a pastoral letter saying, &quot;Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations now fall into the category of genocide.&quot;
And the U.S. was in fact supporting Ríos Montt. The meeting between Reagan and Ríos Montt was very nice for Ríos Montt, because Reagan then came out publicly and said that Ríos Montt was a man of great integrity who was totally devoted to democracy and was getting a bum rap on human rights. Ríos Montt then said, &quot;It&#8217;s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.&quot;
I think one of the interesting points about Ríos Montt&#8217;s statement yesterday and those of the defense lawyers was that they were trying to save themselves, but they were—to do that, they were willing to indict the system. None of them tried to deny the fact that the mass killings took place, or even deny the fact that it was the army that did it. In fact, Ríos Montt&#8217;s defense lawyer at one point referred to one of the prosecution documents, which was a military plan that was used by Ríos Montt describing how they would target various civilian groups. And the lawyer&#8217;s point was: This plan was not directed at the Ixil people; this plan was written for the entire country. Well, yes, it was. The defense lawyer for Rodríguez Sánchez, the intelligence chief who is Ríos Montt&#8217;s co-defendant, at one point he said, &quot;Program of assassination, program of kidnappings—I&#8217;m not interested in those, because my client didn&#8217;t have the power to order them.&quot; So he was not denying the fact that there was a program of assassination. He was not denying the fact that there was a program of kidnapping. He was just saying that his man wasn&#8217;t responsible for them, even though he was the boss of the intelligence section.
AMY GOODMAN : As we wrap up, Allan, can you talk about what this means also for the current government in Guatemala? President Obama just met Pérez Molina last week in Costa Rica. You have Efraín Ríos Montt, in his defense, saying he couldn&#8217;t be in charge, know what was happening on the ground; it was the people who were there, which, of course, goes to the current Guatemalan president, Pérez Molina, who was there on the ground at that time. You spoke to him in the highlands in Guatemala. You spoke to the current president, who was going by a different name at that time.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes. Well, first of all, Ríos Montt knew everything that was happening. The reporting from the field back to the palace was very rigorous. There were only three, and at some points two, layers of authority between Ríos Montt and the killers, the killer commanders in the field who were going into the villages. Ríos Montt&#8217;s field commander for the Ixil region based in Nebaj in September of 1982 was Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala. The dozens and dozens of subordinates of Pérez Molina who I interviewed there at that time described how they were under orders to torture and kill civilians, and also how they made hourly radio reports back to headquarters. They wrote up a daily diary of operations. As one Subcommander Lieutenant Romeo Sierra put it, they were on a very—they were on a very short leash.
So, if Ríos Montt is found guilty of genocide, then the question becomes: Well, what about the man who was the field commander for the massacres that got Ríos Montt convicted of genocide? That man is now the president of Guatemala. Pérez Molina did everything he could to see to it that his name did not come up in this trial. That was the bargain under which the trial was allowed to go forward. He let it go forward very, very reluctantly. One witness, to everyone&#8217;s surprise, a former military man, testified that Pérez Molina had ordered atrocities. I was due to testify in the trial but then was blocked at the last minute from testifying because there was fear that I would also mention Pérez Molina&#8217;s role. But now, as this—if this trial concludes, and if Ríos Montt is convicted, the next question becomes: What about Pérez Molina? And, what about the U.S. sponsors who were providing the weapons, the money, the bombs, the bullets and the political support for the crimes for which Ríos Montt may today be convicted of genocide? Because Guatemalan criminal courts have the authority under international law to bring in U.S. defendants. U.S. criminal courts have that same authority. If there&#8217;s a verdict today against Ríos Montt, that will be the challenge sitting on the—put to the American and the Guatemalan criminal courts: What&#8217;s next? Will you now look at Pérez Molina? Will you now look at the Americans who made this genocide possible?
AMY GOODMAN : We have 30 seconds, Allan. We understand there&#8217;s a list going around on the Internet made by people connected to the military, on Facebook, of traitors. They are—listed activists, NGOs, like the filmmaker Pam Yates and Kate Doyle, the National Security Archives and others?
ALLAN NAIRN : Yeah, this is the army, the retired army and the oligarchy. They have been putting these lists out for years. They threaten everybody. This is their way of acting. But so far, they have not been able to stop the case—
AMY GOODMAN : Rigoberta Menchú, as well. Rigoberta Menchú, as well, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who we saw sitting in the trial.
ALLAN NAIRN : So far, they haven&#8217;t been able to stop the case. And the only way they could stop it now is if they follow through on their threats and try to kill the judge.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank very much, Allan, for being with us, investigative journalist Allan Nairn, speaking to us from Guatemala City.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we&#8217;ll be talking about Bahrain. And then, is the FBI reading your email without warrants? Well, the answer may well be yes. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We begin today’s show in Guatemala. A verdict is expected as early as today in the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. He is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. On Thursday, Ríos Montt testified for the first time during the trial.

EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT: [translated] I never authorized, I never signed, I never proposed, I never ordered that there be any attacks against a race, an ethnic group or any religion. I never did it. And with everything they’ve said, there has been no proof of evidence of my participation. I presented myself voluntarily to the public ministry to be tried. I didn’t want anyone to say I committed genocide, because I have never done so, and I have never done it. I have never ordered it, and I never intended it. And I want that to be known. I have never done it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt speaking Thursday at his historic genocide trial. He ended his testimony with these words.

EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT: [translated] I declare myself innocent. I never had the intention or the purpose to destroy any national ethnic group. As head of state, that was one thing. My work as head of state was to take the reins of the country that was on the edge. Guatemala had failed. And forgive me, Your Honor, the guerrillas were at the door of the presidential palace. Thank you, Your Honor.

AMYGOODMAN: During the trial, nearly a hundred prosecution witnesses described massacres, torture and rape committed by Guatemalan state forces.

We’re joined now by investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He’s in Guatemala City. He has been attending the trial. In the 1980s, Allan Nairn broke many stories about massacres in Guatemala and the U.S. backing of the dictatorships.

Allan Nairn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Describe the significance of Ríos Montt testifying yesterday and the trial overall.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, first, it’s important that the trial was able to go forward. Yesterday, it was still possible that it would be shut down at the last minute. But now, clearly, the political decision has been made to let it go forward, and the only thing that could stop it at this point would be an assassination. The judge in the case, when she leaves the courtroom, she wears a bulletproof vest. She’s surrounded by security. Army associates have made death threats against judges, prosecutors and witnesses. But unless they carry through and pull the trigger sometime this morning, it looked like—it looks like there’s going to be a verdict.

And if there is a verdict, and Ríos Montt and his co-defendant, General Rodríguez Sánchez, are convicted of genocide and/or crimes against humanity, it would be a—it would be a step into the—into the future. It would be, I think, in a sense, the beginning of another historical phase, because all over the world, not just in Guatemala but wherever you have guns and wherever you have power, those who have the most guns are allowed to get away with murder. There is no fear of prosecution for a Guatemalan dictator, for a U.S. president. They can do things that would get an ordinary person thrown in jail.

But actions like this, where survivors of the Mayan highland massacres campaigned for three decades, remembering their wives and their husbands who were slit open with machetes and shot in the face and thrown into ditches while they were still alive, the fact that they were able to campaign for decades, and even though their movement was crushed during the slaughters of the '80s, even though the army and the oligarchy to this day retain power in Guatemala, the people they crushed are on the verge of exacting some justice and may be getting a jail sentence against one of the main people responsible for the deaths of—I mean, nobody knows the exact death toll of all the slaughters. Ríos Montt in this case is being charged with just 1,700 murders, but the complete death toll over the years in Guatemala could amount to something like a quarter million. And no one has really been able to do this before. No one has been able to use their domestic courts to put a former leader on trial for genocide. This is the kind of move that would be unthinkable in the United States. You know, standing in the courtroom yesterday, I was trying to imagine what would the scene be like in the U.S. if, say, George W. Bush were called before a criminal court in Texas and put on trial for Iraq. It's hard to imagine, but here it’s happening.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Allan, I wanted to ask you about a key aspect of Ríos Montt’s defense. Now, obviously, he was making a statement, but he was not being subject to cross-examination at all. It was just his statement at the trial. But he appeared to basically be saying, "Look, these lower-level commanders may have done this, but I did not have any involvement, and I did not give the orders." Yet, in a post that you had this week, you went back over your direct interviews with Ríos Montt back in 1982, where you actually questioned him about what he knew about the killings going on. And I’m wondering if you could go over some of what he told you back then.

ALLANNAIRN: Yeah, in May of ’82, a couple months after he had seized power and sent the army sweeping through the northwest highlands, including the Ixil area, as the army was just wiping out one town after another, executing the civilians, I asked Ríos Montt about the civilian killings. And he said, "Look, for each one who is shooting," meaning for each guerrilla, "there are 10 working behind them," meaning there are 10 unarmed people working behind them. And then his adviser, Francisco Bianchi, said, "We have to kill Indians, the Ixil people, because they have sold out to subversion."

Years later, after Ríos Montt was ousted from power, I interviewed him again. And I asked him whether he thought that he should be put on trial for his role in the massacres and whether he should be executed, since he, Ríos Montt, is a big supporter of the death penalty. And when I asked him that, he suddenly leapt up to his feet and shouted. He said, "Yes, try me! Put me against the wall!" But, he said, that if he was going to be put on trial, the Americans should be put on trial with him. He specifically mentioned Ronald Reagan, who was one of his great sponsors.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, during his testimony, Ríos Montt spoke about his relationship with United States officials and suggested that they had a better sense of what was going on in Guatemala than he did at the time. This is a clip from that.

EFRAÍN RÍOS MONTT: [translated] I had the opportunity to go to some meetings. One nice one was with Mr. Reagan. We met. He invited me. And we were there in San Pedro Sula. And we were there, and we did not ask for arms. We did not ask for aid. And that was what was most sad. We were cut off in all ways. We did not have any international aid. Guatemala survived with the resources that Guatemalans had. There was no other way to survive. And this was important. The U.S. did not give any type of aid. Nor did we get loans, because we were nearly bankrupt. So we didn’t have capital or work. And what affected us economically, the millions of dollars were fleeing the region for fear and lack of security, and there was no investment. The Central American market was reduced perhaps some 25 percent.

This is the big picture of the situation, and they could not see this. They could only what they were interested in: the region of Ixil. The Ixil area, we have seen it, feel it, and we did what we had to do. Now I tell you that it did not count with the support of the armed forces. They all got upset with me, because the ones who were about to retire did.

I had the good fortune of not having the friendship of the U.S. ambassador. And so, he would visit me constantly, Your Honor, so that we could have elections and that we could work in one way or the other. And we would say to His Eminence—oh, I don’t think he was, quote, "Eminence"—we would say to His Excellence, regarding the reports that he had, because he had more reports than we had regarding the nationals—pardon me, no, not with nationals, but those who were paid with American money were involved in the subversion. They had better information than we had. That is a small thing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Allan Nairn, what about this whole issue of what the Americans knew at the time of these killings?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, everybody knew. These massacres were not secret. They were acts of state terrorism where a big part of the point was publicity. When the assassinations were done in the cities, they would often make a point of throwing the bodies in the streets to terrify onlookers. In the massacres in the countryside, the executions would—and torture interrogations would often be carried out in the village square with all the survivors looking on so they would get a lifelong lesson that they would never forget, as they saw their families and their loved ones being strangled and shot in the head. This was all over the newspapers in Guatemala. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference in May of '82, that same month that I had the interview with Ríos Montt where he talked about 10 civilians for every guerrilla, and his aide said they had sold out to subversion, they had to be killed—the Catholic Bishops' Conference issued a pastoral letter saying, "Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations now fall into the category of genocide."

And the U.S. was in fact supporting Ríos Montt. The meeting between Reagan and Ríos Montt was very nice for Ríos Montt, because Reagan then came out publicly and said that Ríos Montt was a man of great integrity who was totally devoted to democracy and was getting a bum rap on human rights. Ríos Montt then said, "It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists."

I think one of the interesting points about Ríos Montt’s statement yesterday and those of the defense lawyers was that they were trying to save themselves, but they were—to do that, they were willing to indict the system. None of them tried to deny the fact that the mass killings took place, or even deny the fact that it was the army that did it. In fact, Ríos Montt’s defense lawyer at one point referred to one of the prosecution documents, which was a military plan that was used by Ríos Montt describing how they would target various civilian groups. And the lawyer’s point was: This plan was not directed at the Ixil people; this plan was written for the entire country. Well, yes, it was. The defense lawyer for Rodríguez Sánchez, the intelligence chief who is Ríos Montt’s co-defendant, at one point he said, "Program of assassination, program of kidnappings—I’m not interested in those, because my client didn’t have the power to order them." So he was not denying the fact that there was a program of assassination. He was not denying the fact that there was a program of kidnapping. He was just saying that his man wasn’t responsible for them, even though he was the boss of the intelligence section.

AMYGOODMAN: As we wrap up, Allan, can you talk about what this means also for the current government in Guatemala? President Obama just met Pérez Molina last week in Costa Rica. You have Efraín Ríos Montt, in his defense, saying he couldn’t be in charge, know what was happening on the ground; it was the people who were there, which, of course, goes to the current Guatemalan president, Pérez Molina, who was there on the ground at that time. You spoke to him in the highlands in Guatemala. You spoke to the current president, who was going by a different name at that time.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes. Well, first of all, Ríos Montt knew everything that was happening. The reporting from the field back to the palace was very rigorous. There were only three, and at some points two, layers of authority between Ríos Montt and the killers, the killer commanders in the field who were going into the villages. Ríos Montt’s field commander for the Ixil region based in Nebaj in September of 1982 was Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala. The dozens and dozens of subordinates of Pérez Molina who I interviewed there at that time described how they were under orders to torture and kill civilians, and also how they made hourly radio reports back to headquarters. They wrote up a daily diary of operations. As one Subcommander Lieutenant Romeo Sierra put it, they were on a very—they were on a very short leash.

So, if Ríos Montt is found guilty of genocide, then the question becomes: Well, what about the man who was the field commander for the massacres that got Ríos Montt convicted of genocide? That man is now the president of Guatemala. Pérez Molina did everything he could to see to it that his name did not come up in this trial. That was the bargain under which the trial was allowed to go forward. He let it go forward very, very reluctantly. One witness, to everyone’s surprise, a former military man, testified that Pérez Molina had ordered atrocities. I was due to testify in the trial but then was blocked at the last minute from testifying because there was fear that I would also mention Pérez Molina’s role. But now, as this—if this trial concludes, and if Ríos Montt is convicted, the next question becomes: What about Pérez Molina? And, what about the U.S. sponsors who were providing the weapons, the money, the bombs, the bullets and the political support for the crimes for which Ríos Montt may today be convicted of genocide? Because Guatemalan criminal courts have the authority under international law to bring in U.S. defendants. U.S. criminal courts have that same authority. If there’s a verdict today against Ríos Montt, that will be the challenge sitting on the—put to the American and the Guatemalan criminal courts: What’s next? Will you now look at Pérez Molina? Will you now look at the Americans who made this genocide possible?

AMYGOODMAN: We have 30 seconds, Allan. We understand there’s a list going around on the Internet made by people connected to the military, on Facebook, of traitors. They are—listed activists, NGOs, like the filmmaker Pam Yates and Kate Doyle, the National Security Archives and others?

ALLANNAIRN: Yeah, this is the army, the retired army and the oligarchy. They have been putting these lists out for years. They threaten everybody. This is their way of acting. But so far, they have not been able to stop the case—

AMYGOODMAN: Rigoberta Menchú, as well. Rigoberta Menchú, as well, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who we saw sitting in the trial.

ALLANNAIRN: So far, they haven’t been able to stop the case. And the only way they could stop it now is if they follow through on their threats and try to kill the judge.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank very much, Allan, for being with us, investigative journalist Allan Nairn, speaking to us from Guatemala City.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll be talking about Bahrain. And then, is the FBI reading your email without warrants? Well, the answer may well be yes. Stay with us.

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Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Prosecutors Seek 75-Year Sentence for U.S.-Backed Guatemalan Dictator Ríos Montt in Genocide Trialhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/9/prosecutors_seek_75_year_sentence_for
tag:democracynow.org,2013-05-09:en/story/56ea86 AMY GOODMAN : We go from Chicago to Guatemala. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we end today&#8217;s show with an update on the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan—former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He is the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. The trial had been suspended but has since been revived. Ríos Montt is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala&#8217;s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. On Wednesday, prosecutors asked for Ríos Montt to be sentenced to 75 years in prison. Ríos Montt&#8217;s defense team is expected to give closing arguments today.
AMY GOODMAN : During the trial, Guatemala&#8217;s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was also directly accused of ordering executions during Guatemala&#8217;s decades-long campaign against the Maya indigenous people. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court President Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s.
We&#8217;re going now to Guatemala City to Allan Nairn, investigative journalist. In the 1980s, Allan Nairn extensively documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared to present evidence at the trial, though he didn&#8217;t ultimately testify.
Allan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Tell us what&#8217;s happening today. You expect a verdict and a sentence?
ALLAN NAIRN : It&#8217;s possible. The trial—the trial was killed, essentially, after intervention by Guatemala&#8217;s president on April 18th, but now it apparently is on the verge of being revived. There was a fierce backlash against the efforts by the president, General Pérez Molina, to stop the trial, resistance from within Guatemala, also internationally. And yesterday afternoon, the trial got back to business. They began closing statements. The prosecutors presented their request for a 75-year sentence Ríos Montt and also that he be taken from house arrest and placed in jail to prevent him from fleeing the country after the verdict.
It&#8217;s possible a verdict could come today, but it&#8217;s also possible that it could be—the trial could be shut down at the last minute. There have been repeated death threats against judges and prosecutors. Yesterday, Ríos Montt&#8217;s lawyer, in open court, threatened to have the judges thrown in jail. A higher court could be used politically to kill the case at the last moment. So it&#8217;s really hanging in the balance. The case could be finished off today, or it could be allowed to reach a verdict.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, the significance of this case? Is Ríos Montt the first former head of state tried within his own country for genocide?
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes, and this is being done within the domestic court system. It&#8217;s been a tremendous political struggle. It&#8217;s been led by the survivors of the massacres. They&#8217;ve been fighting for this for decades. And they&#8217;re on the brink of getting a verdict, of actually enforcing the murder laws.
But there are many people in the Guatemalan oligarchy, in the military, who don&#8217;t like it. They see this trial as a threat to their way of life, as a threat to their ability to continue to carry on local assassinations, which still happen in the Guatemalan countryside. In fact, as we speak, the president, General Pérez Molina, has imposed a state of siege in four municipalities to try to put down popular resistance against Canadian-U.S. silver mining projects.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you expect this verdict and sentence to actually happen today, and do you think it&#8217;s possible, 75 years?
ALLAN NAIRN : It could, if the trial is allowed to proceed without interference. It could—it could be put off until tomorrow. You can&#8217;t really predict what the verdict will be, but the prosecution has presented a very powerful, well-documented case, with the testimony of dozens upon dozens of massacre survivors, thousands of pages of documents. And Ríos Montt&#8217;s defense has not really put up a factual defense. Ríos Montt has refused to speak. They&#8217;ve just used politics, outside intervention, to try to kill the case.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you, Allan, for being with us. Allan Nairn, investigative journalist. If the verdict does come down, we&#8217;ll be going to Guatemala City tomorrow to cover the story. He was asked to testify in Guatemala in the landmark trial against the former U.S.-backed dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, though he ultimately didn&#8217;t testify. The trial could end today with a verdict and sentence. Go to our website at democracynow.org for the latest.
Before we go to credits, Juan, you will be going to Philadelphia tomorrow .
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, for the—tomorrow night is the opening of the last showing, premiering of the Harvest of Empire film, and it will be at the Riverview Plaza Stadium 17 theaters. And I&#8217;ll be speaking after the 7:25 showing.
AMY GOODMAN : And you can go to our website for details at democracynow.org. AMYGOODMAN: We go from Chicago to Guatemala. Juan?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we end today’s show with an update on the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan—former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. He is the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. The trial had been suspended but has since been revived. Ríos Montt is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. On Wednesday, prosecutors asked for Ríos Montt to be sentenced to 75 years in prison. Ríos Montt’s defense team is expected to give closing arguments today.

AMYGOODMAN: During the trial, Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was also directly accused of ordering executions during Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against the Maya indigenous people. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court President Pérez Molina, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Maya Ixil area in the 1980s.

We’re going now to Guatemala City to Allan Nairn, investigative journalist. In the 1980s, Allan Nairn extensively documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared to present evidence at the trial, though he didn’t ultimately testify.

Allan, welcome back to Democracy Now! Tell us what’s happening today. You expect a verdict and a sentence?

ALLANNAIRN: It’s possible. The trial—the trial was killed, essentially, after intervention by Guatemala’s president on April 18th, but now it apparently is on the verge of being revived. There was a fierce backlash against the efforts by the president, General Pérez Molina, to stop the trial, resistance from within Guatemala, also internationally. And yesterday afternoon, the trial got back to business. They began closing statements. The prosecutors presented their request for a 75-year sentence Ríos Montt and also that he be taken from house arrest and placed in jail to prevent him from fleeing the country after the verdict.

It’s possible a verdict could come today, but it’s also possible that it could be—the trial could be shut down at the last minute. There have been repeated death threats against judges and prosecutors. Yesterday, Ríos Montt’s lawyer, in open court, threatened to have the judges thrown in jail. A higher court could be used politically to kill the case at the last moment. So it’s really hanging in the balance. The case could be finished off today, or it could be allowed to reach a verdict.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, the significance of this case? Is Ríos Montt the first former head of state tried within his own country for genocide?

ALLANNAIRN: Yes, and this is being done within the domestic court system. It’s been a tremendous political struggle. It’s been led by the survivors of the massacres. They’ve been fighting for this for decades. And they’re on the brink of getting a verdict, of actually enforcing the murder laws.

But there are many people in the Guatemalan oligarchy, in the military, who don’t like it. They see this trial as a threat to their way of life, as a threat to their ability to continue to carry on local assassinations, which still happen in the Guatemalan countryside. In fact, as we speak, the president, General Pérez Molina, has imposed a state of siege in four municipalities to try to put down popular resistance against Canadian-U.S. silver mining projects.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you expect this verdict and sentence to actually happen today, and do you think it’s possible, 75 years?

ALLANNAIRN: It could, if the trial is allowed to proceed without interference. It could—it could be put off until tomorrow. You can’t really predict what the verdict will be, but the prosecution has presented a very powerful, well-documented case, with the testimony of dozens upon dozens of massacre survivors, thousands of pages of documents. And Ríos Montt’s defense has not really put up a factual defense. Ríos Montt has refused to speak. They’ve just used politics, outside intervention, to try to kill the case.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you, Allan, for being with us. Allan Nairn, investigative journalist. If the verdict does come down, we’ll be going to Guatemala City tomorrow to cover the story. He was asked to testify in Guatemala in the landmark trial against the former U.S.-backed dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, though he ultimately didn’t testify. The trial could end today with a verdict and sentence. Go to our website at democracynow.org for the latest.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, for the—tomorrow night is the opening of the last showing, premiering of the Harvest of Empire film, and it will be at the Riverview Plaza Stadium 17 theaters. And I’ll be speaking after the 7:25 showing.

AMYGOODMAN: And you can go to our website for details at democracynow.org.

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Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400Genocide Trial of Former Dictator Ríos Montt Suspended After Intervention by Guatemalan Presidenthttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/genocide_trial_of_former_dictator_ros
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-19:en/story/8bdd33 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: An historic trial against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an abrupt end Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a criminal court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported last night Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala&#8217;s president, General Otto Pérez Molina.
Ríos Montt was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.
He was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala&#8217;s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala&#8217;s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
On Thursday, survivors of the genocide attempted to approach Ríos Montt inside the courtroom, screaming &quot;Murderer!&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala&#8217;s current president, General Otto Pérez Molina, was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that President Pérez, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Mayan Ixil area in the 1980s.
We&#8217;re going right now to investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He flew to Guatemala City last week after we—he was called to testify in Ríos Montt&#8217;s trial. He was listed by the court as a &quot;qualified
witness&quot; and was tentatively scheduled to testify Monday. But at the last minute he was kept off the stand &quot;in order,&quot; he was told, &quot;to avoid a confrontation&quot; with the president, General Pérez Molina, and for fear that if he took the stand, military elements might respond with violence.
In the &#8217;80s, Allan Nairn had extensively documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared to present evidence that personally implicated Pérez Molina, who was field commander during the very Maya Ixil region massacres for which the ex-dictator, General Ríos Montt, has been charged with genocide.
Allan Nairn, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the significance of the latest developments, the annulling of the trial of Ríos Montt?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, this trial was a breakthrough, not just for Guatemala, but for the world. It was the first time that any nation had been able to use its domestic criminal courts to try a former head of state for genocide. Dozens upon dozens of Mayan survivors of the massacres risked their lives to come and testify. A massive evidentiary record was put together, in my view, to proving a case of genocide against General Ríos Montt and his co-defendant, his former intelligence chief. A verdict was just hours away. A verdict could have come today in the trial, but yesterday it was all annulled after intervention by General Pérez Molina, the current president, and the Guatemalan military and oligarchy killed it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, can you talk about what you learned in terms of the threats to the judges and—the judge and the prosecutor and what&#8217;s been their reaction, even though they&#8217;ve been sitting here now for several weeks in this trial?
ALLAN NAIRN : In one case, one of—one of the lawyers involved in pushing the case forward was approached by a man who offered him a million dollars if he would kill the case against Ríos Montt, a million U.S. dollars. He also said he would help him launder the money, set up offshore bank accounts. The lawyer rejected that. The man then took out a pistol, put the pistol on the table and said, &quot;I know where your children are.&quot; Another was approached on the street with a—with a direct death threat. Despite those threats, though, the case went forward. And now, after [inaudible] to kill the case, the attorney general of Guatemala, the trial judge presiding in the case are both vowing to try to go forward with it. They&#8217;re vowing to continue with the court hearing just a couple hours from now, even though they&#8217;ve been told they can&#8217;t. So a direct political confrontation has been set.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He&#8217;s in Guatemala City. We&#8217;re reaching him by Democracy Now! video stream. Listen carefully. It&#8217;s a little difficult to make out what he is saying. But, Allan, we wanted to ask about why your testimony was canceled before the overall annulment of the trial yesterday. Why was your testimony considered so dangerous?
ALLAN NAIRN : I was given to understand that if I were called to the stand, two things would happen. First, President Pérez Molina would intervene to shut down the trial. And secondly, there could be violence, particularly from retired military. The reason was that, as you mentioned in the introduction, one witness had already implicated Pérez Molina in the massacres. He was a field commander at that time. After that testimony, Pérez Molina called in the attorney general, and the word went out that if he was mentioned again in the trial, if his name came up once, he would immediately shut it down. So—and they knew that I could implicate Pérez Molina further, because I had met him in the highlands during the massacres when he was operating under a code name. And I interviewed soldiers under his command who described how, under orders, they executed and tortured civilians.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, in terms of the—of Pérez Molina himself, you have a situation here, obviously, after the Central America accords, when some sort of relative peace came to the region. How did Pérez Molina rise to power, being one of the underlings of Ríos Montt and the military that visited such carnage and such destruction on the people of Guatemala?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, the reason the military was doing those massacres in the first place was to preserve a political and economic system under which there was 80 percent attrition in the area around Nebaj, which is where Pérez Molina was stationed and where, at the same time, there were world-class rich people running the plantations, the banks, the industries. Those massacres were basically successful in crushing the population and crushing any resistance and in maintaining that system. And within that system, Pérez Molina was able to rise. He became a colonel. He became the head of the G-2 military intelligence service during a time [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re having a little trouble hearing, Allan.
ALLAN NAIRN : —placed on the CIA payroll. At one point, an office under his control was implicated in the—at one point, an office under Pérez Molina&#8217;s control was implicated in the assassination of a judge. He rose to general, and he was able to become president. That&#8217;s the—that&#8217;s the Guatemalan system. Yet, remarkably, even given that system, this movement from below of massacre survivors who refused to give up, who insisted on trying to bring generals to justice, was able to generate this trial, aided by people of integrity who had found their way into the Guatemalan judiciary and prosecution system, and a trial was begun. They heard massive amounts of evidence. I believe it was on the verge of giving a verdict, but then, at the last minute, Pérez Molina and the powers that be intervened.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly, Allan, we just have less than a minute, the attorney general is a woman. The judge is a woman. They are saying they&#8217;re going to move forward with this case, although it has been anulled, with a trial today? And what about protests outside?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, protests are planned outside the court. The judge, Yassmin Barrios, and the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, both say they&#8217;re going to defy this order to kill the case, which is extraordinary. You know, this indicates, I think, that Guatemala has reached a higher level of civilization than the United States has. Even though this case was killed in the end, it&#8217;s inconceivable that in the United States a U.S. attorney, say, could indict a former U.S. president, could indict a George W. Bush for what he did in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, or could indict an Obama, and that this could proceed to trial and that massive amounts of evidence could be heard. That&#8217;s not yet conceivable in the American legal system, but it happened here in Guatemala, and it almost succeeded. It came very close. And now there&#8217;s going to be a popular reaction to try to continue that fight for law enforcement and justice.
AMY GOODMAN : And is it possible the trial will continue?
ALLAN NAIRN : Excuse me?
AMY GOODMAN : Is it possible the trial will continue?
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, I guess it&#8217;s possible, if Judge—Judge Barrios and the prosecutors are physically allowed into the courtroom, that they could try to have the trial. But the powers that be above them have now banned it, have now prohibited it. Ríos Montt and his lawyers may not show up. I don&#8217;t know what will happen. This is a real political crisis for Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, speaking to us from Guatemala City. When we come back, we sat down with Allan before he left to go through the history of this trial and also play the videotape of his interview with the current president back more than 20 years ago when he was a major under Ríos Montt, on trial for genocide. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: An historic trial against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an abrupt end Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a criminal court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn reported last night Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina.

Ríos Montt was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.
He was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign against Maya indigenous people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

On Thursday, survivors of the genocide attempted to approach Ríos Montt inside the courtroom, screaming "Murderer!"

AMYGOODMAN: The trial took a surprising turn last week when Guatemala’s current president, General Otto Pérez Molina, was directly accused of ordering executions. A former military mechanic named Hugo Reyes told the court that President Pérez, then serving as an army major and using the name Tito Arias, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage a Mayan Ixil area in the 1980s.

We’re going right now to investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He flew to Guatemala City last week after we—he was called to testify in Ríos Montt’s trial. He was listed by the court as a "qualified
witness" and was tentatively scheduled to testify Monday. But at the last minute he was kept off the stand "in order," he was told, "to avoid a confrontation" with the president, General Pérez Molina, and for fear that if he took the stand, military elements might respond with violence.

In the ’80s, Allan Nairn had extensively documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared to present evidence that personally implicated Pérez Molina, who was field commander during the very Maya Ixil region massacres for which the ex-dictator, General Ríos Montt, has been charged with genocide.

Allan Nairn, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the significance of the latest developments, the annulling of the trial of Ríos Montt?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, this trial was a breakthrough, not just for Guatemala, but for the world. It was the first time that any nation had been able to use its domestic criminal courts to try a former head of state for genocide. Dozens upon dozens of Mayan survivors of the massacres risked their lives to come and testify. A massive evidentiary record was put together, in my view, to proving a case of genocide against General Ríos Montt and his co-defendant, his former intelligence chief. A verdict was just hours away. A verdict could have come today in the trial, but yesterday it was all annulled after intervention by General Pérez Molina, the current president, and the Guatemalan military and oligarchy killed it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, can you talk about what you learned in terms of the threats to the judges and—the judge and the prosecutor and what’s been their reaction, even though they’ve been sitting here now for several weeks in this trial?

ALLANNAIRN: In one case, one of—one of the lawyers involved in pushing the case forward was approached by a man who offered him a million dollars if he would kill the case against Ríos Montt, a million U.S. dollars. He also said he would help him launder the money, set up offshore bank accounts. The lawyer rejected that. The man then took out a pistol, put the pistol on the table and said, "I know where your children are." Another was approached on the street with a—with a direct death threat. Despite those threats, though, the case went forward. And now, after [inaudible] to kill the case, the attorney general of Guatemala, the trial judge presiding in the case are both vowing to try to go forward with it. They’re vowing to continue with the court hearing just a couple hours from now, even though they’ve been told they can’t. So a direct political confrontation has been set.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to investigative journalist Allan Nairn. He’s in Guatemala City. We’re reaching him by Democracy Now! video stream. Listen carefully. It’s a little difficult to make out what he is saying. But, Allan, we wanted to ask about why your testimony was canceled before the overall annulment of the trial yesterday. Why was your testimony considered so dangerous?

ALLANNAIRN: I was given to understand that if I were called to the stand, two things would happen. First, President Pérez Molina would intervene to shut down the trial. And secondly, there could be violence, particularly from retired military. The reason was that, as you mentioned in the introduction, one witness had already implicated Pérez Molina in the massacres. He was a field commander at that time. After that testimony, Pérez Molina called in the attorney general, and the word went out that if he was mentioned again in the trial, if his name came up once, he would immediately shut it down. So—and they knew that I could implicate Pérez Molina further, because I had met him in the highlands during the massacres when he was operating under a code name. And I interviewed soldiers under his command who described how, under orders, they executed and tortured civilians.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Allan, in terms of the—of Pérez Molina himself, you have a situation here, obviously, after the Central America accords, when some sort of relative peace came to the region. How did Pérez Molina rise to power, being one of the underlings of Ríos Montt and the military that visited such carnage and such destruction on the people of Guatemala?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, the reason the military was doing those massacres in the first place was to preserve a political and economic system under which there was 80 percent attrition in the area around Nebaj, which is where Pérez Molina was stationed and where, at the same time, there were world-class rich people running the plantations, the banks, the industries. Those massacres were basically successful in crushing the population and crushing any resistance and in maintaining that system. And within that system, Pérez Molina was able to rise. He became a colonel. He became the head of the G-2 military intelligence service during a time [inaudible]—

AMYGOODMAN: We’re having a little trouble hearing, Allan.

ALLANNAIRN: —placed on the CIA payroll. At one point, an office under his control was implicated in the—at one point, an office under Pérez Molina’s control was implicated in the assassination of a judge. He rose to general, and he was able to become president. That’s the—that’s the Guatemalan system. Yet, remarkably, even given that system, this movement from below of massacre survivors who refused to give up, who insisted on trying to bring generals to justice, was able to generate this trial, aided by people of integrity who had found their way into the Guatemalan judiciary and prosecution system, and a trial was begun. They heard massive amounts of evidence. I believe it was on the verge of giving a verdict, but then, at the last minute, Pérez Molina and the powers that be intervened.

AMYGOODMAN: Very quickly, Allan, we just have less than a minute, the attorney general is a woman. The judge is a woman. They are saying they’re going to move forward with this case, although it has been anulled, with a trial today? And what about protests outside?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, protests are planned outside the court. The judge, Yassmin Barrios, and the attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, both say they’re going to defy this order to kill the case, which is extraordinary. You know, this indicates, I think, that Guatemala has reached a higher level of civilization than the United States has. Even though this case was killed in the end, it’s inconceivable that in the United States a U.S. attorney, say, could indict a former U.S. president, could indict a George W. Bush for what he did in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, or could indict an Obama, and that this could proceed to trial and that massive amounts of evidence could be heard. That’s not yet conceivable in the American legal system, but it happened here in Guatemala, and it almost succeeded. It came very close. And now there’s going to be a popular reaction to try to continue that fight for law enforcement and justice.

AMYGOODMAN: And is it possible the trial will continue?

ALLANNAIRN: Excuse me?

AMYGOODMAN: Is it possible the trial will continue?

ALLANNAIRN: Well, I guess it’s possible, if Judge—Judge Barrios and the prosecutors are physically allowed into the courtroom, that they could try to have the trial. But the powers that be above them have now banned it, have now prohibited it. Ríos Montt and his lawyers may not show up. I don’t know what will happen. This is a real political crisis for Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, speaking to us from Guatemala City. When we come back, we sat down with Allan before he left to go through the history of this trial and also play the videotape of his interview with the current president back more than 20 years ago when he was a major under Ríos Montt, on trial for genocide. Stay with us.

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Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400Exclusive: Allan Nairn Exposes Role of U.S. and New Guatemalan President in Indigenous Massacreshttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/exclusive_allan_nairn_exposes_role_of
tag:democracynow.org,2013-04-19:en/story/8c8d28 AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. I began by asking him to describe just who Ríos Montt is.
ALLAN NAIRN : Ríos Montt was the dictator of Guatemala during 1982, &#39;83. He seized power in a military coup. He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity, someone totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil Mayans. These charges are being brought because the prosecutors have the names of each of these victims. They&#39;ve been able to dig up the bones of most of them.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about how this campaign, this slaughter, was carried out and how it links to, well, the current government in Guatemala today.
ALLAN NAIRN : The army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they&#8217;ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt&#8217;s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see.
The soldiers I interviewed would describe their interrogation techniques, which they had been taught at the army general staff. And they said they would ask people, &quot;Who in the town are the guerrillas?&quot; And if the people would respond, &quot;We don&#8217;t know,&quot; then they would strangle them to death. These sweeps were intense. The soldiers said that often they would kill about a third of a town&#8217;s population. Another third they would capture and resettle in army camps. And the rest would flee into the mountains. There, in the mountains, the military would pursue them using U.S.-supplied helicopters, U.S.- and Israeli-supplied planes. They would drop U.S. 50-kilogram bombs on them, and they would machine-gun them from U.S. Huey and Bell helicopters, using U.S.-supplied heavy-caliber machine guns.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s turn to a clip of you interviewing a soldier in the highlands. This is from a Finnish documentary—is that right? And when was this done? When were you talking to soldiers there?
ALLAN NAIRN : This was in September of 1982 in the Ixil zone in the area surrounding the town of Nebaj.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s go to a clip of this interview.
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] This is how we are successful. And also, if we have already interrogated them, the only thing we can do is kill them.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] And how many did you kill?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] We killed the majority. There is nothing else to do than kill them.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] So you killed them at once?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] Yes. If they do not want to do the right things, there is nothing more to do than bomb the houses.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Bomb? With what?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] Well, with grenades or collective bombs.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] What is a collective bomb?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] They are like cannons.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Do you use helicopters?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] Yes.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] What is the largest amount of people you have killed at once?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] Well, really, in Sololá, around 500 people.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] And how do they react when you arrive?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] Who?
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] The people from the small villages.
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] When the army arrives, they flee from their houses. And so, as they flee to the mountains, the army is forced to kill them.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] And in which small village did the army do that kind of thing?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] That happened a lot of times.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Specifically, could you give me some examples where these things happened?
GUATEMALAN SOLDIER : [translated] In Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande, Acul.
AMY GOODMAN : When did you interview this soldier, Allan?
ALLAN NAIRN : This was in September of &#8217;82.
AMY GOODMAN : What were you doing there?
ALLAN NAIRN : Making a documentary for Scandinavian television.
AMY GOODMAN : So you have soldiers talking about killing civilians, the brutal interrogations that they were engaged in. Why would they be telling you this? You&#8217;re a journalist. They&#8217;re talking about crimes they&#8217;re committing.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, because this is their everyday life. They do this all the time. They do it under orders from the top of the chain of command, at that time Ríos Montt. And they had hardly ever seen journalists at that time. It was very rare for an outside journalist or even a local journalist to go into that area.
AMY GOODMAN : So let&#8217;s take this to the current day, to the president of Guatemala today, because at the same time you were interviewing these soldiers, you interviewed the Guatemalan president—at least the Guatemalan president today in 2013.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes, the senior officer, the commander in Nebaj, was a man who used the code name &quot;Mayor Tito,&quot; Major Tito. It turns out that that man&#8217;s real name was Otto Pérez Molina. Otto Pérez Molina later ascended to general, and today he is the president of Guatemala. So he is the one who was the local implementer of the program of genocide which Ríos Montt is accused of carrying out.
AMY GOODMAN : This is a huge charge. I mean, right now, it&#8217;s an historic trial when it&#8217;s 25 years after a past president is now being charged. Let&#8217;s go to a clip of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala, but this is 1982 in the heartland area of Quiché in northwest Guatemala, northwest of Guatemala City. In this video clip, Otto Pérez Molina is seen reading from political literature found on one of the bodies. This is your interview with him.
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] &quot;The poor artisan fights alongside the worker. The poor peasant fights alongside the worker. The wealth is produced by us, the poor. The army takes the poor peasants. Together, we have an invincible force. All the families are with the guerrilla, the guerrilla army of the poor, toward final victory forever.&quot; These are the different fronts that they have.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] So here they are saying that the army killed some people.
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN : I mean, this is astounding. This is the current president of Guatemala standing over these bodies. Tell us more.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, as one of the soldiers says in the sound in the background, the—Pérez Molina interrogated these men. And soon after, they were—they were dead. And one soldier told me off camera that in fact after Pérez Molina interrogated them, they finished them off.
AMY GOODMAN : This man, Pérez Molina, the president, actually was going by a code name at the time. When was it clear that this is Pérez Molina? Though we have a very clear shot of him.
ALLAN NAIRN : For a long time, Pérez Molina was trying to obscure his past and apparently hide the fact that he played this role in a supervisory position during the highland massacres. During the Guatemalan presidential campaign, which Pérez Molina eventually won, about two years ago, I got calls while I was in Asia from the Guatemalan press, from The Wall Street Journal , asking whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito, the man in the video who I encountered in the northwest highlands in the midst of the massacres—whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito was in fact General Otto Pérez Molina, the presidential candidate. And I said that I couldn&#8217;t, just from looking at the current videos. You know, people can change a lot visually over 30 years, so I said I couldn&#8217;t be sure. It turns out that—and during the campaign, when reporters would ask the Pérez Molina campaign, &quot;Is Pérez Molina Mayor Tito?&quot; they would dodge the question. They would evade. They were running from it. It turns out, though, we just learned this week, that Pérez Molina had admitted back in 2000 that he was Mayor Tito. But then, apparently afterward, he thought better of it and was trying to bury it. And now, this is potentially trouble for him. He&#8217;s currently president, and so, under Guatemalan law, he enjoys immunity. But once he leaves the presidency, he could, in theory, be subject to prosecution, just as Ríos Montt is now being prosecuted.
AMY GOODMAN : That could be a serious motivation for him declaring himself president for life.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, Ríos Montt seized power by a coup, but one of the important facts about the situation now is that the military men don&#8217;t have the power that they used to. The fact that this trial is happening is an indication of that. This trial is happening because the survivors refused to give up. They persisted—the survivors have been working on this for decades, pushing to bring Ríos Montt and the other generals to justice. They refused to give up. They got support from international—some international human rights lawyers. And within the Guatemalan justice system, there were a few people of integrity who ascended to positions of some authority within the prosecutorial system, within the judiciary. And so, we now have this near-political miracle of a country bringing to trial its former dictator for genocide, while the president of the country, who was implicated in those killings, sits by.
AMY GOODMAN : Allan, this video that we have of you interviewing Pérez Molina—again, as you said, he admitted to the Guatemalan newspaper, Prensa Libre , in 2000 that he used the nickname Tito—is quite astounding. So let&#8217;s go to another clip, where you&#8217;re talking to him about the kind of support that he wants.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] The United States is considering giving military help here in the form of helicopters. What is the importance of helicopters for all of you?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] A helicopter is an apparatus that&#8217;s become of great importance not only here in Guatemala but also in other countries where they&#8217;ve had problems of a counterinsurgency.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Like in Vietnam?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] In Vietnam, for example, the helicopter was an apparatus that was used a lot.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Can you also use it in combat?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Yes, of course. The helicopters that are military types, they are equipped to support operations in the field. They have machine guns and rocket launchers.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] What type of mortars are you guys using?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] There&#8217;s various types of mortars. We have small mortars and the mortars Tampella.
ALLAN NAIRN : Tampella.
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Yes, it&#8217;s a mortar that&#8217;s 60 millimeters.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Is it very powerful? Does it have a lot of force to destroy things?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Yes, it&#8217;s a weapon that&#8217;s very effective. It&#8217;s very useful, and it has a very good result in our operation in defense of the country.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Is it against a person or...?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Yes, it&#8217;s an anti-personnel weapon.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Do you have one here?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] It&#8217;s light and easy to transport, as well.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] So, it&#8217;s very light, and you can use it with your hand.
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] Exactly, with the hand.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] Where did you get them?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] These, we got from Israel.
ALLAN NAIRN : [translated] And where do you get the ammunition?
MAYOR OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] That&#8217;s also from Israel.
AMY GOODMAN : So, this is, again, the current president, Pérez Molina, of Guatemala, the general you met in the highlands in 1982, asking for more aid. Talk about the relationship between Guatemala then and the United States.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, the U.S. was the sponsor of the Guatemalan army, as it had been for many decades, as the U.S. has and continues to sponsor dozens and dozens of repressive armies all over the world. In the case of Guatemala, if you go into the military academy and you see the pictures of the past presidents of military academy, some of them are actually Americans. They&#8217;re actual American officers there who were openly running the Guatemalan military training. By the &#8217;80s, when the Ríos Montt massacres were being carried out, the U.S. Congress was under the impression that they had successfully stopped U.S. military aid to Guatemala. But in fact it was continuing. The CIA had an extensive program of backing the G-2, the G-2, the military intelligence service, which selected the targets for assassination and disappearance. They even—they even built a headquarters for—a secret headquarters for the G-2 near the Guatemala City airport. They had American advisers working inside the headquarters. Out in the field, Guatemalan troops were receiving from the U.S. ammunition, weapons.
And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video, actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an Israeli-made mortar. That mortar and the helicopters he was asking for from the U.S., those were the kind of weapons they would use to bomb villages and attack people as they were fleeing in the mountains. In listening to the testimony in the trial up to this moment, I was struck by the fact that almost every witness mentioned that they had been attacked from the air, that either their village had been bombed or strafed or that they were bombed or strafed as they were fleeing in the mountains. This testimony suggests that the use of this U.S. and Israeli aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil highlands was actually much more extensive than we understood at the time.
Beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there&#8217;s the question of doctrine. Yesterday in the trial, the Ríos Montt defense called forward a general, a former commander of the G-2, as an expert witness on the defense side. And at the end of his testimony, the prosecution read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos Montt general, &quot;Well, General, what is your response to this document?&quot; And the general responded by saying, &quot;Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document.&quot; So this doctrine of killing civilians, even down to women, children and sick people, was, as the general testified, adopted from the U.S. Indeed, years before, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala, Colonel John Webber, had said to Time magazine that the Guatemalan army was licensed to kill guerrillas and potential guerrillas. And, of course, the category of potential guerrillas can include anyone, including children.
And the point of guerrilla civilians is actually very important to understanding this. Those bodies that Pérez Molina was standing over in Nebaj in 1982 in the film we saw, those were actually an exception to the rule, because the truth commission which investigated the massacres in Guatemala found that 93 percent of the victims were civilians killed by the Guatemalan army. But there was also some combat going on between the army and guerrillas. And in that case, in the video we saw, the bodies Pérez Molina was standing over were guerrillas, guerrillas that the army had captured. And one of them in captivity had set off a hand grenade as a suicide act, but apparently, from what I saw and what the soldiers told me, apparently they survived the blast, and they were then turned over to Pérez Molina for interrogation. He interrogated them, and then, as we saw, they turned up dead. But in the vast majority of cases, they were civilians, completely unarmed people, who were targeted by Ríos Montt&#8217;s army for elimination.
And I asked Ríos Montt about this practice on two different occasions, first in an interview with him two months after he seized power in 1982, and then later, years later, after he had been thrown out of power. And when I asked him in &#8217;82 about the fact that so many civilians were being killed by the army, he said, &quot;Look, for each one who is shooting, there are 10 who are standing behind him,&quot; meaning: Behind the guerrillas there are vast numbers of civilians. His senior aide and his spokesman, a man named Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him at this interview, then expanded on the point. Bianchi said the guerrillas—well, the indigenous population—he called them &quot;indios,&quot; which is a slur in Guatemalan Spanish—
AMY GOODMAN : For Indians.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes—were collaborating with the guerrilla, therefore it was necessary to kill Indians. &quot;And people would say,&quot; Bianchi continued, &quot;&#39;Oh, you&#39;re massacring all these innocent Indians&quot;—&quot;innocent Indios,&quot; in his words. But Bianchi then said, &quot;But, no, they are not innocent, because they had sold out to subversion.&quot; So this is the—this is the doctrine of killing civilians, and particularly Mayans, because the army saw them collectively as a group. They didn&#8217;t view them as individuals, but they saw them collectively as a group as sold out to subversion. And this was a doctrine that the U.S. supported.
AMY GOODMAN : Journalist Allan Nairn. The interview we did was recorded last week just before he left for Guatemala to testify in the trial against the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. But at the last minute, his testimony was canceled late yesterday. The trial was canceled. We&#8217;ll continue with the interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Mercedes Sosa, here on Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report , as we continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. His testimony was canceled. The trial was canceled last night. But I asked Allan to talk about how he managed to interview the Guatemalan dictator, Ríos Montt, two months after he seized power in the 1980s.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, he was—he was giving press interviews. This was an interview in the palace. I was there with a couple of other reporters. Ríos Montt was very outspoken. He would go on TV and say, &quot;Today we are going to begin a merciless struggle. We are going to kill, but we are going to kill legally.&quot; That was his style, to speak directly. And it&#8217;s in great contrast to what he&#8217;s doing today. I mean, it&#8217;s very interesting from point of view of people who&#8217;ve survived these kind of generals who live on the blood of the people, not just in Guatemala but in Salvador, in East Timor, in Indonesia, in countless countries where the U.S. has backed this kind of terror. You have the spectacle now of this general, who once made poor people tremble at the sight of him, at the mention of him, now he&#8217;s hiding. In the trial, he refuses to talk. He will not defend himself. He&#8217;s like a common thug taken off the streets who invokes his Fifth Amendment—invokes his Fifth Amendment rights. But back then, when he had the power, when no one could challenge him, he would speak fairly openly. In fact, the second time I spoke to him, a number of years after, I asked Ríos Montt whether he thought that he should be executed, whether he should be tried and executed because of his own responsibility for the highland massacres, and he responded by jumping to his feet and shouting, &quot;Yes! Put me on trial. Put me against the wall. But if you&#8217;re going to put me on trial, you have to try the Americans first, including Ronald Reagan.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Allan Nairn, at the time in Guatemala, you not only were interviewing, well, now the current president, Pérez Molina, who was in the highlands at the time standing over dead bodies, but you were also talking to U.S. officials, and I want to go to this issue of U.S. involvement in what happened in Guatemala. Tell us about U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth, a man you got to interview at the time during the Ríos Montt years.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, Bosworth was, at the time, an important player in U.S. Central American policy. And he, along with Elliott Abrams, for example, attacked Amnesty International when Amnesty was trying to report on the assassinations of labor leaders and priests and peasant organizers and activists in the Mayan highlands. And he also was denying that the U.S. was giving military assistance to the Guatemalan army that was carrying out those crimes.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s turn to the interview you did with then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth.
STEPHEN BOSWORTH : Well, I think the important factor is that there has been, over the last six months, evidence of significant improvement in the human rights situation in Guatemala. Since the coming into power of the Ríos Montt government, the level of violence in the country, politically inspired violence, particularly in the urban areas, has declined rather dramatically. That being said, however, I think it&#8217;s important also to note that the level of violence in the countryside continues at a level which is of concern to all. And while it is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute responsibility for that violence in each instance, it is clear that in the countryside the government does indeed need to make further progress in terms of improving its control over government troops.
AMY GOODMAN : You also, Allan Nairn, asked the then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth precisely what was the U.S. military presence and role in Guatemala. This is how Bosworth responded.
STEPHEN BOSWORTH : We have no military presence or role. We have, as a part of our diplomatic establishment, a defense attaché office and a military representative. But that is the same sort of representation that we have in virtually all other countries in the world. We do not have American trainers working with the Guatemalan army. We do not have American military personnel active in Guatemala in that—in that sort of area.
ALLAN NAIRN : There are no American trainers there?
STEPHEN BOSWORTH : No.
ALLAN NAIRN : None performing the types of functions that go on in El Salvador, for instance?
STEPHEN BOSWORTH : No, there are not.
AMY GOODMAN : That was then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth. Respond to what he said, and tell us who he later became, who he is today in the U.S. government.
ALLAN NAIRN : Well, first, just about everything that Bosworth said there was a lie. He said that the killings were down. In fact, they increased dramatically under Ríos Montt. He said, quite interestingly, that it was impossible to know and attribute responsibility for what was happening. Well, the Conference of Catholic Bishops had no difficulty knowing and attributing responsibility. They said that the killings have reached the extreme of genocide. They were saying this at the moment that the massacres were happening and at the moment that Bosworth was denying it. And they and the survivors and the human rights groups were all clearly blaming it on the army.
And then, finally, he said that the army has to be careful to maintain control over its troops. Well, there was a very strict control. In fact, the officers in the field in the Ixil zone that I interviewed at the time said they were on a very short leash and that there were only three layers of command between themselves in the field and Ríos Montt. And, in fact, a few weeks earlier, there had been only two layers of command between themselves and Ríos Montt.
Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, &quot;how to destroy towns.&quot; This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA -built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.
AMY GOODMAN : The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in 2009, well, he played a key role in the Obama administration.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a normally functioning political system, if a high government official lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea. He&#8217;s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.
AMY GOODMAN : In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called &quot; CIA Death Squad,&quot; in which he described how Americans were directly involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with Elliott Abrams.
ELLIOTT ABRAMS : Wait a minute. We&#8217;re not here to refight the Cold War. We&#8217;re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it. Now, I&#8217;m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.
ALLAN NAIRN : So you&#8217;re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.
ELLIOTT ABRAMS : I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in Guatemala.
CHARLIE ROSE : Alright, well, I—
ALLAN NAIRN : A communist guerrilla victory.
CHARLIE ROSE : Yeah, I—
ALLAN NAIRN : Ninety-five percent of these victims are civilians—peasant organizers, human rights leaders—
CHARLIE ROSE : I am happy to invite both of you—
ALLAN NAIRN : —priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let&#8217;s look at reality here. In reality, we&#8217;re not talking about two murders, one colonel. We&#8217;re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We&#8217;re talking about crimes, and we&#8217;re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that&#8217;s a good idea. But if you&#8217;re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000 M-16s to Guatemala. In &#8217;87 and &#8217;88—
CHARLIE ROSE : Alright, but hold on one second. I just—before—because the—
ALLAN NAIRN : They voted more military aid than the Republicans asked for.
CHARLIE ROSE : Again, I invite you and Elliott Abrams back to discuss what he did. But right now, you—
ELLIOTT ABRAMS : No, thanks, Charlie, but I won&#8217;t accept—
CHARLIE ROSE : Hold on one second. Go ahead. You want to repeat the question, of you want to be in the dock?
ELLIOTT ABRAMS : It is ludicrous. It is ludicrous to respond to that kind of stupidity. This guy thinks we were on the wrong side in the Cold War. Maybe he personally was on the wrong side. I am one of the many millions of Americans who thinks we were happy to win.
CHARLIE ROSE : Alright, I don&#8217;t—
ALLAN NAIRN : Mr. Abrams, you were on the wrong side in supporting the massacre of peasants and organizers, anyone who dared to speak, absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE : What I want to do is I want to ask the following question.
ALLAN NAIRN : And that&#8217;s a crime. That&#8217;s a crime, Mr. Abrams, for which people should be tried. U.S. laws—
ELLIOTT ABRAMS : Why don&#8217;t you—yes, right, we&#8217;ll put all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Elliott Abrams—he served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from &#8217;81 to &#8217;85—debating investigative journalist Allan Nairn on the Charlie Rose show. Actually, Congressmember Robert Torricelli, then from New Jersey, before he became senator, was also in that discussion at another point. Allan, the significance of what Mr. Abrams was saying? He went on, Abrams, to deal with the Middle East.
ALLAN NAIRN : Yes. Well, he—when I said that he should be tried by a Nuremberg-style tribunal, he basically reacted by saying I was crazy, that this was a crazy idea that you could try U.S. officials for supplying weapons to armies that kill civilians. But people also thought that it was crazy that Ríos Montt could face justice in Guatemala. But after decades of work by the survivors of his Mayan highland massacres, today, as we speak, Ríos Montt is sitting in the dock.
AMY GOODMAN : Award-winning journalist Allan Nairn, speaking last week before he flew to Guatemala. On Thursday, a landmark genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt was suspended after the trial threatened to implicate the current president of Guatemala in the mass killings of civilians. Allan reports Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala&#8217;s president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Some of the video footage used in the show comes from a 1983 documentary directed by Mikael Wahlforss. We&#8217;ll link to it at democracynow.org and to Allan Nairn&#8217;s website, allannairn.org .
That does it for our show. Juan González will be speaking tonight in Chicago at 8:15 at the Gene Siskel Film Center at North State Street and tomorrow at noon at Wayne State University [in Detroit] at noon . AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. We continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. I began by asking him to describe just who Ríos Montt is.

ALLANNAIRN: Ríos Montt was the dictator of Guatemala during 1982, '83. He seized power in a military coup. He was trained in the U.S. He had served in Washington as head of the Inter-American Defense College. And while he was president, he was embraced by Ronald Reagan as a man of great integrity, someone totally devoted to democracy. And he killed many tens of thousands of civilians, particularly in the Mayan northwest highlands. In this particular trial, he is being charged with 1,771 specific murders in the area of the Ixil Mayans. These charges are being brought because the prosecutors have the names of each of these victims. They've been able to dig up the bones of most of them.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about how this campaign, this slaughter, was carried out and how it links to, well, the current government in Guatemala today.

ALLANNAIRN: The army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified in the trial that 80 percent of the remains they’ve recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt’s troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see.

The soldiers I interviewed would describe their interrogation techniques, which they had been taught at the army general staff. And they said they would ask people, "Who in the town are the guerrillas?" And if the people would respond, "We don’t know," then they would strangle them to death. These sweeps were intense. The soldiers said that often they would kill about a third of a town’s population. Another third they would capture and resettle in army camps. And the rest would flee into the mountains. There, in the mountains, the military would pursue them using U.S.-supplied helicopters, U.S.- and Israeli-supplied planes. They would drop U.S. 50-kilogram bombs on them, and they would machine-gun them from U.S. Huey and Bell helicopters, using U.S.-supplied heavy-caliber machine guns.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s turn to a clip of you interviewing a soldier in the highlands. This is from a Finnish documentary—is that right? And when was this done? When were you talking to soldiers there?

ALLANNAIRN: This was in September of 1982 in the Ixil zone in the area surrounding the town of Nebaj.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip of this interview.

GUATEMALANSOLDIER: [translated] This is how we are successful. And also, if we have already interrogated them, the only thing we can do is kill them.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] And how many did you kill?

GUATEMALANSOLDIER: [translated] We killed the majority. There is nothing else to do than kill them.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] So you killed them at once?

GUATEMALANSOLDIER: [translated] Yes. If they do not want to do the right things, there is nothing more to do than bomb the houses.

AMYGOODMAN: So you have soldiers talking about killing civilians, the brutal interrogations that they were engaged in. Why would they be telling you this? You’re a journalist. They’re talking about crimes they’re committing.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, because this is their everyday life. They do this all the time. They do it under orders from the top of the chain of command, at that time Ríos Montt. And they had hardly ever seen journalists at that time. It was very rare for an outside journalist or even a local journalist to go into that area.

AMYGOODMAN: So let’s take this to the current day, to the president of Guatemala today, because at the same time you were interviewing these soldiers, you interviewed the Guatemalan president—at least the Guatemalan president today in 2013.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes, the senior officer, the commander in Nebaj, was a man who used the code name "Mayor Tito," Major Tito. It turns out that that man’s real name was Otto Pérez Molina. Otto Pérez Molina later ascended to general, and today he is the president of Guatemala. So he is the one who was the local implementer of the program of genocide which Ríos Montt is accused of carrying out.

AMYGOODMAN: This is a huge charge. I mean, right now, it’s an historic trial when it’s 25 years after a past president is now being charged. Let’s go to a clip of Otto Pérez Molina, the current president of Guatemala, but this is 1982 in the heartland area of Quiché in northwest Guatemala, northwest of Guatemala City. In this video clip, Otto Pérez Molina is seen reading from political literature found on one of the bodies. This is your interview with him.

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] "The poor artisan fights alongside the worker. The poor peasant fights alongside the worker. The wealth is produced by us, the poor. The army takes the poor peasants. Together, we have an invincible force. All the families are with the guerrilla, the guerrilla army of the poor, toward final victory forever." These are the different fronts that they have.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] So here they are saying that the army killed some people.

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly.

AMYGOODMAN: I mean, this is astounding. This is the current president of Guatemala standing over these bodies. Tell us more.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, as one of the soldiers says in the sound in the background, the—Pérez Molina interrogated these men. And soon after, they were—they were dead. And one soldier told me off camera that in fact after Pérez Molina interrogated them, they finished them off.

AMYGOODMAN: This man, Pérez Molina, the president, actually was going by a code name at the time. When was it clear that this is Pérez Molina? Though we have a very clear shot of him.

ALLANNAIRN: For a long time, Pérez Molina was trying to obscure his past and apparently hide the fact that he played this role in a supervisory position during the highland massacres. During the Guatemalan presidential campaign, which Pérez Molina eventually won, about two years ago, I got calls while I was in Asia from the Guatemalan press, from The Wall Street Journal, asking whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito, the man in the video who I encountered in the northwest highlands in the midst of the massacres—whether I could vouch for the fact that Mayor Tito was in fact General Otto Pérez Molina, the presidential candidate. And I said that I couldn’t, just from looking at the current videos. You know, people can change a lot visually over 30 years, so I said I couldn’t be sure. It turns out that—and during the campaign, when reporters would ask the Pérez Molina campaign, "Is Pérez Molina Mayor Tito?" they would dodge the question. They would evade. They were running from it. It turns out, though, we just learned this week, that Pérez Molina had admitted back in 2000 that he was Mayor Tito. But then, apparently afterward, he thought better of it and was trying to bury it. And now, this is potentially trouble for him. He’s currently president, and so, under Guatemalan law, he enjoys immunity. But once he leaves the presidency, he could, in theory, be subject to prosecution, just as Ríos Montt is now being prosecuted.

AMYGOODMAN: That could be a serious motivation for him declaring himself president for life.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, Ríos Montt seized power by a coup, but one of the important facts about the situation now is that the military men don’t have the power that they used to. The fact that this trial is happening is an indication of that. This trial is happening because the survivors refused to give up. They persisted—the survivors have been working on this for decades, pushing to bring Ríos Montt and the other generals to justice. They refused to give up. They got support from international—some international human rights lawyers. And within the Guatemalan justice system, there were a few people of integrity who ascended to positions of some authority within the prosecutorial system, within the judiciary. And so, we now have this near-political miracle of a country bringing to trial its former dictator for genocide, while the president of the country, who was implicated in those killings, sits by.

AMYGOODMAN: Allan, this video that we have of you interviewing Pérez Molina—again, as you said, he admitted to the Guatemalan newspaper, Prensa Libre, in 2000 that he used the nickname Tito—is quite astounding. So let’s go to another clip, where you’re talking to him about the kind of support that he wants.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] The United States is considering giving military help here in the form of helicopters. What is the importance of helicopters for all of you?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] A helicopter is an apparatus that’s become of great importance not only here in Guatemala but also in other countries where they’ve had problems of a counterinsurgency.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] Like in Vietnam?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] In Vietnam, for example, the helicopter was an apparatus that was used a lot.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] Can you also use it in combat?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Yes, of course. The helicopters that are military types, they are equipped to support operations in the field. They have machine guns and rocket launchers.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] What type of mortars are you guys using?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] There’s various types of mortars. We have small mortars and the mortars Tampella.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] So, it’s very light, and you can use it with your hand.

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] Exactly, with the hand.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] Where did you get them?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] These, we got from Israel.

ALLANNAIRN: [translated] And where do you get the ammunition?

MAYOROTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] That’s also from Israel.

AMYGOODMAN: So, this is, again, the current president, Pérez Molina, of Guatemala, the general you met in the highlands in 1982, asking for more aid. Talk about the relationship between Guatemala then and the United States.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, the U.S. was the sponsor of the Guatemalan army, as it had been for many decades, as the U.S. has and continues to sponsor dozens and dozens of repressive armies all over the world. In the case of Guatemala, if you go into the military academy and you see the pictures of the past presidents of military academy, some of them are actually Americans. They’re actual American officers there who were openly running the Guatemalan military training. By the ’80s, when the Ríos Montt massacres were being carried out, the U.S. Congress was under the impression that they had successfully stopped U.S. military aid to Guatemala. But in fact it was continuing. The CIA had an extensive program of backing the G-2, the G-2, the military intelligence service, which selected the targets for assassination and disappearance. They even—they even built a headquarters for—a secret headquarters for the G-2 near the Guatemala City airport. They had American advisers working inside the headquarters. Out in the field, Guatemalan troops were receiving from the U.S. ammunition, weapons.

And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video, actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an Israeli-made mortar. That mortar and the helicopters he was asking for from the U.S., those were the kind of weapons they would use to bomb villages and attack people as they were fleeing in the mountains. In listening to the testimony in the trial up to this moment, I was struck by the fact that almost every witness mentioned that they had been attacked from the air, that either their village had been bombed or strafed or that they were bombed or strafed as they were fleeing in the mountains. This testimony suggests that the use of this U.S. and Israeli aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil highlands was actually much more extensive than we understood at the time.

Beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there’s the question of doctrine. Yesterday in the trial, the Ríos Montt defense called forward a general, a former commander of the G-2, as an expert witness on the defense side. And at the end of his testimony, the prosecution read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos Montt general, "Well, General, what is your response to this document?" And the general responded by saying, "Well, that training document which we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document." So this doctrine of killing civilians, even down to women, children and sick people, was, as the general testified, adopted from the U.S. Indeed, years before, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala, Colonel John Webber, had said to Time magazine that the Guatemalan army was licensed to kill guerrillas and potential guerrillas. And, of course, the category of potential guerrillas can include anyone, including children.

And the point of guerrilla civilians is actually very important to understanding this. Those bodies that Pérez Molina was standing over in Nebaj in 1982 in the film we saw, those were actually an exception to the rule, because the truth commission which investigated the massacres in Guatemala found that 93 percent of the victims were civilians killed by the Guatemalan army. But there was also some combat going on between the army and guerrillas. And in that case, in the video we saw, the bodies Pérez Molina was standing over were guerrillas, guerrillas that the army had captured. And one of them in captivity had set off a hand grenade as a suicide act, but apparently, from what I saw and what the soldiers told me, apparently they survived the blast, and they were then turned over to Pérez Molina for interrogation. He interrogated them, and then, as we saw, they turned up dead. But in the vast majority of cases, they were civilians, completely unarmed people, who were targeted by Ríos Montt’s army for elimination.

And I asked Ríos Montt about this practice on two different occasions, first in an interview with him two months after he seized power in 1982, and then later, years later, after he had been thrown out of power. And when I asked him in ’82 about the fact that so many civilians were being killed by the army, he said, "Look, for each one who is shooting, there are 10 who are standing behind him," meaning: Behind the guerrillas there are vast numbers of civilians. His senior aide and his spokesman, a man named Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him at this interview, then expanded on the point. Bianchi said the guerrillas—well, the indigenous population—he called them "indios," which is a slur in Guatemalan Spanish—

AMYGOODMAN: For Indians.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes—were collaborating with the guerrilla, therefore it was necessary to kill Indians. "And people would say," Bianchi continued, "'Oh, you're massacring all these innocent Indians"—"innocent Indios," in his words. But Bianchi then said, "But, no, they are not innocent, because they had sold out to subversion." So this is the—this is the doctrine of killing civilians, and particularly Mayans, because the army saw them collectively as a group. They didn’t view them as individuals, but they saw them collectively as a group as sold out to subversion. And this was a doctrine that the U.S. supported.

AMYGOODMAN: Journalist Allan Nairn. The interview we did was recorded last week just before he left for Guatemala to testify in the trial against the Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. But at the last minute, his testimony was canceled late yesterday. The trial was canceled. We’ll continue with the interview in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Mercedes Sosa, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we continue our coverage of the historic trial of former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Allan Nairn joined us in our studio last week before he flew to Guatemala. His testimony was canceled. The trial was canceled last night. But I asked Allan to talk about how he managed to interview the Guatemalan dictator, Ríos Montt, two months after he seized power in the 1980s.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, he was—he was giving press interviews. This was an interview in the palace. I was there with a couple of other reporters. Ríos Montt was very outspoken. He would go on TV and say, "Today we are going to begin a merciless struggle. We are going to kill, but we are going to kill legally." That was his style, to speak directly. And it’s in great contrast to what he’s doing today. I mean, it’s very interesting from point of view of people who’ve survived these kind of generals who live on the blood of the people, not just in Guatemala but in Salvador, in East Timor, in Indonesia, in countless countries where the U.S. has backed this kind of terror. You have the spectacle now of this general, who once made poor people tremble at the sight of him, at the mention of him, now he’s hiding. In the trial, he refuses to talk. He will not defend himself. He’s like a common thug taken off the streets who invokes his Fifth Amendment—invokes his Fifth Amendment rights. But back then, when he had the power, when no one could challenge him, he would speak fairly openly. In fact, the second time I spoke to him, a number of years after, I asked Ríos Montt whether he thought that he should be executed, whether he should be tried and executed because of his own responsibility for the highland massacres, and he responded by jumping to his feet and shouting, "Yes! Put me on trial. Put me against the wall. But if you’re going to put me on trial, you have to try the Americans first, including Ronald Reagan."

AMYGOODMAN: Allan Nairn, at the time in Guatemala, you not only were interviewing, well, now the current president, Pérez Molina, who was in the highlands at the time standing over dead bodies, but you were also talking to U.S. officials, and I want to go to this issue of U.S. involvement in what happened in Guatemala. Tell us about U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth, a man you got to interview at the time during the Ríos Montt years.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, Bosworth was, at the time, an important player in U.S. Central American policy. And he, along with Elliott Abrams, for example, attacked Amnesty International when Amnesty was trying to report on the assassinations of labor leaders and priests and peasant organizers and activists in the Mayan highlands. And he also was denying that the U.S. was giving military assistance to the Guatemalan army that was carrying out those crimes.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s turn to the interview you did with then U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth.

STEPHENBOSWORTH: Well, I think the important factor is that there has been, over the last six months, evidence of significant improvement in the human rights situation in Guatemala. Since the coming into power of the Ríos Montt government, the level of violence in the country, politically inspired violence, particularly in the urban areas, has declined rather dramatically. That being said, however, I think it’s important also to note that the level of violence in the countryside continues at a level which is of concern to all. And while it is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute responsibility for that violence in each instance, it is clear that in the countryside the government does indeed need to make further progress in terms of improving its control over government troops.

AMYGOODMAN: You also, Allan Nairn, asked the then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth precisely what was the U.S. military presence and role in Guatemala. This is how Bosworth responded.

STEPHENBOSWORTH: We have no military presence or role. We have, as a part of our diplomatic establishment, a defense attaché office and a military representative. But that is the same sort of representation that we have in virtually all other countries in the world. We do not have American trainers working with the Guatemalan army. We do not have American military personnel active in Guatemala in that—in that sort of area.

ALLANNAIRN: There are no American trainers there?

STEPHENBOSWORTH: No.

ALLANNAIRN: None performing the types of functions that go on in El Salvador, for instance?

STEPHENBOSWORTH: No, there are not.

AMYGOODMAN: That was then-U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs Stephen Bosworth. Respond to what he said, and tell us who he later became, who he is today in the U.S. government.

ALLANNAIRN: Well, first, just about everything that Bosworth said there was a lie. He said that the killings were down. In fact, they increased dramatically under Ríos Montt. He said, quite interestingly, that it was impossible to know and attribute responsibility for what was happening. Well, the Conference of Catholic Bishops had no difficulty knowing and attributing responsibility. They said that the killings have reached the extreme of genocide. They were saying this at the moment that the massacres were happening and at the moment that Bosworth was denying it. And they and the survivors and the human rights groups were all clearly blaming it on the army.

And then, finally, he said that the army has to be careful to maintain control over its troops. Well, there was a very strict control. In fact, the officers in the field in the Ixil zone that I interviewed at the time said they were on a very short leash and that there were only three layers of command between themselves in the field and Ríos Montt. And, in fact, a few weeks earlier, there had been only two layers of command between themselves and Ríos Montt.

Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, "how to destroy towns." This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA-built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.

AMYGOODMAN: The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in 2009, well, he played a key role in the Obama administration.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a normally functioning political system, if a high government official lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea. He’s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.

AMYGOODMAN: In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called "CIA Death Squad," in which he described how Americans were directly involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with Elliott Abrams.

ELLIOTTABRAMS: Wait a minute. We’re not here to refight the Cold War. We’re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it. Now, I’m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.

ALLANNAIRN: So you’re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.

ELLIOTTABRAMS: I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in Guatemala.

ALLANNAIRN: —priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let’s look at reality here. In reality, we’re not talking about two murders, one colonel. We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000 M-16s to Guatemala. In ’87 and ’88—

CHARLIEROSE: Alright, but hold on one second. I just—before—because the—

ALLANNAIRN: They voted more military aid than the Republicans asked for.

CHARLIEROSE: Again, I invite you and Elliott Abrams back to discuss what he did. But right now, you—

ELLIOTTABRAMS: No, thanks, Charlie, but I won’t accept—

CHARLIEROSE: Hold on one second. Go ahead. You want to repeat the question, of you want to be in the dock?

ELLIOTTABRAMS: It is ludicrous. It is ludicrous to respond to that kind of stupidity. This guy thinks we were on the wrong side in the Cold War. Maybe he personally was on the wrong side. I am one of the many millions of Americans who thinks we were happy to win.

CHARLIEROSE: Alright, I don’t—

ALLANNAIRN: Mr. Abrams, you were on the wrong side in supporting the massacre of peasants and organizers, anyone who dared to speak, absolutely.

CHARLIEROSE: What I want to do is I want to ask the following question.

ALLANNAIRN: And that’s a crime. That’s a crime, Mr. Abrams, for which people should be tried. U.S. laws—

ELLIOTTABRAMS: Why don’t you—yes, right, we’ll put all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Elliott Abrams—he served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from ’81 to ’85—debating investigative journalist Allan Nairn on the Charlie Rose show. Actually, Congressmember Robert Torricelli, then from New Jersey, before he became senator, was also in that discussion at another point. Allan, the significance of what Mr. Abrams was saying? He went on, Abrams, to deal with the Middle East.

ALLANNAIRN: Yes. Well, he—when I said that he should be tried by a Nuremberg-style tribunal, he basically reacted by saying I was crazy, that this was a crazy idea that you could try U.S. officials for supplying weapons to armies that kill civilians. But people also thought that it was crazy that Ríos Montt could face justice in Guatemala. But after decades of work by the survivors of his Mayan highland massacres, today, as we speak, Ríos Montt is sitting in the dock.

AMYGOODMAN: Award-winning journalist Allan Nairn, speaking last week before he flew to Guatemala. On Thursday, a landmark genocide trial against former Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt was suspended after the trial threatened to implicate the current president of Guatemala in the mass killings of civilians. Allan reports Guatemalan army associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Some of the video footage used in the show comes from a 1983 documentary directed by Mikael Wahlforss. We’ll link to it at democracynow.org and to Allan Nairn’s website, allannairn.org.

]]>
Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400Former Guantánamo Prisoner Speaks Out on Lawsuit Seeking Bush's Arrest in Canada for Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/10/20/former_guantnamo_prisoner_speaks_out_on
tag:democracynow.org,2011-10-20:en/story/211e8d JUAN GONZALEZ : Police in British Columbia have taken extra security measures ahead of today&#8217;s visit by former President W. Bush, who is set to speak there at an economic summit. The security is to handle hundreds of protesters, but Amnesty International has also called on the Canadian government to arrest Bush and either prosecute or extradite him for his role in torture. Amnesty says a failure by Canada to take action during Bush&#8217;s visit would violate the U.N. Convention against Torture.
Meanwhile, four men who say they were tortured in U.S. prisons during the Bush administration will lodge a private prosecution today against the former president in a Canadian provincial court. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Center for International Justice have already submitted a 69-page draft indictment to Canada&#8217;s attorney general, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, that set forth the case against Bush for torture.
AMY GOODMAN : The four men named in the lawsuit are Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz. They also say they endured years of torture in U.S. custody. Hassan bin Attash remains at Guantánamo. The other three have been released.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by one of the alleged torture victims, Murat Kurnaz, former prisoner at Guantánamo. He&#8217;s a Turkish national who was born in Germany. He was detained in Pakistan at the age of 19 in 2001. He&#8217;s joins us on Democracy Now! video stream from Germany.
Here in New York, we&#8217;re joined by Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who&#8217;s assisting the plaintiffs in the case.
Why don&#8217;t we begin by going to Germany, by asking about what exactly your charges are?
MURAT KURNAZ : So, because he is—I believe George Bush is a criminal, and he has to pay for this, what he did. And even in my own case, even though I was got proven that I&#8217;m innocent, and know I had done anything wrong, so they kept me for like five years. After that I got proof that I&#8217;m innocent, they kept me five more years, so—and they never stopped the torture. And some people are responsible for this, of course.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Tell us about your case. You were picked up in Pakistan. How were you picked up? How were you brought to Guantánamo? And what kind of—what kinds of things did authorities do to you when you were in Guantánamo?
MURAT KURNAZ : I was close to the airport. I had already bought my plane ticket to go back to Germany. And I was close to the airport in Pakistan, when the police, Pakistani police, stopped the bus and they asked me a couple questions. Afterwards, they just captured me, and they put me in handcuffs on. And a few weeks later, they sold me to the American government, to the American army. And, of course, during this time, they never told me what&#8217;s going on. Even I asked for a phone call, and I asked what&#8217;s going on. They never allowed me to have a phone call with my home or any lawyer. And later, I found out that they sold me for a bounty of $3,000 to the American army as a terrorist.
AMY GOODMAN : Katherine Gallagher, talk about the overall case and how Murat Kurnaz&#8217;s story fits into that.
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Sure. What&#8217;s happening today in Canada is George Bush and Bill Clinton will be sitting down at an economic forum. So we will be presenting to the provincial court in Surrey, where that talk is taking place, a four-count information, which sets out criminal charges for torture on behalf of Murat and others. And we put George Bush&#8217;s accountability before the provincial court in Surrey. We lay out his admissions for torture. We lay out the torture program which he authorized. And we put the four cases of the men in that overall context of secret detention sites, extraordinary rendition, quote-unquote &quot;enhanced&quot; interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, and really lay out a case for prosecution.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Now, of these four men, three were held for years, never charged, and then released, and one is still in Guantánamo? Could you talk a little bit about them?
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Sure. And in fact, none of the four men, including the man who&#8217;s been in Guantánamo now for nine-and-a-half years, none of them have been charged with anything. The case of Sami el-Hajj, he was a journalist for Al Jazeera. Murat Kurnaz, who you&#8217;ve just heard his story. Muhammed Khan Tumani, he and his father were arrested in Pakistan. All of the arrests of these four men occurred in Pakistan. Muhammed was only 17 at the time he was detained. And he was kept in solitary confinement for a good deal of the time that he was in Guantánamo and suffered psychological torture, physical torture. And I think it&#8217;s important to remember that, even after release, these men continue to suffer the scars of their detention, both because of the aftermath, the mental effects of the torture, and also because of the stigma that&#8217;s attached to them. They have restrictions on their travel. Muhammed Khan Tumani cannot travel to see his father, who has also been released. And that is continued harm.
AMY GOODMAN : When you were at Guantánamo, Murat Kurnaz, what exactly happened to you there? And did you say you were sold to the Americans in Pakistan?
MURAT KURNAZ : When I arrived into American custody, so, they was not interested who I am. They just forced me to agree that I&#8217;m the member of al-Qaeda and that I&#8217;m the terrorist. So, they forced me to sign papers, I should agree that I&#8217;m the member of al-Qaeda. And because I refused to sign those kind of papers, they never stopped the torture. They tortured me by electroshocks and by waterboarding and different kinds, all kinds. They—every day, they came and beat me up for not signing those papers.
AMY GOODMAN : And you refused to the end?
MURAT KURNAZ : Yes, of course. They tried this for five years, and I refused to sign, five years long. Even on the day of my—on the day when they released me, they brought me those kinds of papers and told me, &quot;If you don&#8217;t sign now, you will not leave this place, and you will stay five more years.&quot; And they tried to make me sign even in the last few minutes during my detention in Guantánamo.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And how long were you detained before your family or your loved ones even knew where you were or what had happened to you?
MURAT KURNAZ : I even didn&#8217;t—for the first three or four years, I did not know that I had a lawyer, and I even didn&#8217;t know if my family knows that I&#8217;m alive in Guantánamo, so—because we was not allowed to have any phone call or family visits and to read the newspaper or to watch news. So that mean we didn&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on in the out world. I even didn&#8217;t know that there is a war in Iraq and between the U.S.A. and Iran. So I really didn&#8217;t know anything about my own case. Nothing.
AMY GOODMAN : Did the Red Cross visit you?
MURAT KURNAZ : The Red Cross, they came a few times, but they was not authorized to send any kind of postcards, if it&#8217;s got not—if it&#8217;s not gotten approved by the American U.S. Army, so...
AMY GOODMAN : Who waterboarded you?
MURAT KURNAZ : The soldiers and the interrogator.
AMY GOODMAN : How often?
MURAT KURNAZ : With waterboarding, that was just one time. It&#8217;s actually not called waterboarding. It&#8217;s a kind of waterboarding. It&#8217;s really called &quot;water treatment.&quot; There&#8217;s a difference between waterboarding and water treatment. So, the water treatment means they have some buckets, bucket over with—full with water. They stick my head into it, and I have handcuffs behind my back. Two soldiers, they hold me, and another one, he stick my head into this water. And in the same time, they hit me into my stomach, so I had to—I had to try—so, if you inhale all those water, it gives you the feeling of drowning into water. And the U.S. Army means that as a technique, adhering technique, so it&#8217;s—they believe they can reach a couple things with it, so...
JUAN GONZALEZ : And Katherine Gallagher, the Amnesty call, at the same time, for President Bush to be indicted, the relationship of your case of these four men to this call by Amnesty, if any?
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Sure. Yeah, what&#8217;s been amazing here is we&#8217;ve seen a unified call from human rights organizations, from legal groups, for prosecution. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the CCIJ , the Canadian Center for International Justice, we have actually twice already tried to solicit the attorney general of Canada to open an investigation over the past three weeks, in the same way that Amnesty has. And for all of these calls that have gone in to the attorney general, he thus far has shown no willingness to investigate or prosecute George Bush. That is why today we are taking this step to initiate the prosecution ourselves on behalf of these four men. And Amnesty will be out on the street today. I think we&#8217;re seeing Occupy Wall Street move to Occupy Surrey today. And we will need to keep calls going in to the attorney general of Canada to support this case, now that it will be in the court today.
AMY GOODMAN : So it&#8217;s called a private prosecution?
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Yes. What is being done is, an information is being laid that will be a sworn information. And once that is completed, the case will be transferred over to a provincial judge in Surrey. And we need, then, the attorney general, after eight days, to certify this case to proceed. In the meantime, we will be asking for an immediate hearing to be able to present the case of these four men and the case against George Bush. And should Canada not be willing to allow this case to proceed, we will then go to the United Nations and ask them to review the actions of Canada, which has an obligation as a signatory under the Convention against Torture to investigate and prosecute torture in their country.
AMY GOODMAN : What about here? You&#8217;re talking about doing this in Canada, trying to get President Bush arrested. President Bush lives in the United States. And then there&#8217;s a second question: one of the men you&#8217;re talking about doing this on behalf of is still at Guantánamo. President Obama is also here.
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Mm-hmm, yes. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are not able to initiate private prosecutions. We have called on, and continue to call on, and will continue to present evidence to the attorney general, Eric Holder, and ask him to uphold the United States&#8217; obligations, because, of course, we have been in breach of our obligations under the Convention against Torture. So this fight against impunity needs to be fought domestically, I absolutely agree, and internationally. Today we are turning to our partners in the north to help us close the impunity gap. And we hope to see that take place.
AMY GOODMAN : Murat Kurnaz, when did you come out of Guantánamo? And how have you been able to adjust? How long has it been?
MURAT KURNAZ : It&#8217;s already five years ago that I got released. So I have—I got released in 2006.
AMY GOODMAN : And how have you adjusted? How have you adjusted, Murat? How have you been able to make the transition out of Guantánamo, psychologically and physically?
MURAT KURNAZ : Oh, I had—I, myself, I have not any problems, psychologically problems, but that does not mean that all other ones feel the same. So, there are many other prisoners who got released, and they have big problems with it. They have psychological or physical problems. And so, I, myself, I feel psychologically OK. But I don&#8217;t know how it comes to this, but I am happy that I have family here in Germany, so as soon as I got released, they picked me up, and everything was well.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Katherine Gallagher, didn&#8217;t something like this happen when President Bush wanted to go to Switzerland? And what happened to him there? He didn&#8217;t go.
KATHERINE GALLAGHER : Yes. In February of this year, we were working to file a case there on behalf of two Guantánamo detainees—one former, one current detainee. And there were protests that were being planned there. And on the day that we made the announcement of a press conference to announce the case, George Bush canceled his trip. Here, we will see George Bush, I think, arrive in Canada today.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Katherine Gallagher of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Murat Kurnaz, thank you very much for joining us. He&#8217;s joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Germany. He is a Turkish national who was born in Germany, detained in Pakistan at the age of 19 in 2001, held at Guantánamo for years.
And I want to bring our viewers and listeners this update. An NTC spokesman is telling Sky News that Muammar Gaddafi is dead, and the body is arriving in Misurata any minute now, The Guardian newspaper is reporting. We cannot confirm this. And The Guardian is also showing an image that—from a mobile phone, that shows the arrest of Gaddafi. Again, we are showing this at democracynow.org. These are extremely graphic images. For our radio listening audience around the world, it is a picture of Gaddafi, extremely bloody. And that&#8217;s the latest that we have so far. Again, the reports, a NTC spokesperson saying that Gaddafi is dead and that the body will be arriving in Misurata any moment.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, detentions in the United States of immigrants are at an all-time high. More than a million immigrants have been deported under President Obama. Stay with us. JUANGONZALEZ: Police in British Columbia have taken extra security measures ahead of today’s visit by former President W. Bush, who is set to speak there at an economic summit. The security is to handle hundreds of protesters, but Amnesty International has also called on the Canadian government to arrest Bush and either prosecute or extradite him for his role in torture. Amnesty says a failure by Canada to take action during Bush’s visit would violate the U.N. Convention against Torture.

Meanwhile, four men who say they were tortured in U.S. prisons during the Bush administration will lodge a private prosecution today against the former president in a Canadian provincial court. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Center for International Justice have already submitted a 69-page draft indictment to Canada’s attorney general, along with more than 4,000 pages of supporting material, that set forth the case against Bush for torture.

AMYGOODMAN: The four men named in the lawsuit are Hassan bin Attash, Sami el-Hajj, Muhammed Khan Tumani and Murat Kurnaz. They also say they endured years of torture in U.S. custody. Hassan bin Attash remains at Guantánamo. The other three have been released.

For more, we’re joined by one of the alleged torture victims, Murat Kurnaz, former prisoner at Guantánamo. He’s a Turkish national who was born in Germany. He was detained in Pakistan at the age of 19 in 2001. He’s joins us on Democracy Now! video stream from Germany.

Here in New York, we’re joined by Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who’s assisting the plaintiffs in the case.

Why don’t we begin by going to Germany, by asking about what exactly your charges are?

MURATKURNAZ: So, because he is—I believe George Bush is a criminal, and he has to pay for this, what he did. And even in my own case, even though I was got proven that I’m innocent, and know I had done anything wrong, so they kept me for like five years. After that I got proof that I’m innocent, they kept me five more years, so—and they never stopped the torture. And some people are responsible for this, of course.

JUANGONZALEZ: Tell us about your case. You were picked up in Pakistan. How were you picked up? How were you brought to Guantánamo? And what kind of—what kinds of things did authorities do to you when you were in Guantánamo?

MURATKURNAZ: I was close to the airport. I had already bought my plane ticket to go back to Germany. And I was close to the airport in Pakistan, when the police, Pakistani police, stopped the bus and they asked me a couple questions. Afterwards, they just captured me, and they put me in handcuffs on. And a few weeks later, they sold me to the American government, to the American army. And, of course, during this time, they never told me what’s going on. Even I asked for a phone call, and I asked what’s going on. They never allowed me to have a phone call with my home or any lawyer. And later, I found out that they sold me for a bounty of $3,000 to the American army as a terrorist.

AMYGOODMAN: Katherine Gallagher, talk about the overall case and how Murat Kurnaz’s story fits into that.

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Sure. What’s happening today in Canada is George Bush and Bill Clinton will be sitting down at an economic forum. So we will be presenting to the provincial court in Surrey, where that talk is taking place, a four-count information, which sets out criminal charges for torture on behalf of Murat and others. And we put George Bush’s accountability before the provincial court in Surrey. We lay out his admissions for torture. We lay out the torture program which he authorized. And we put the four cases of the men in that overall context of secret detention sites, extraordinary rendition, quote-unquote "enhanced" interrogation techniques at Guantánamo, and really lay out a case for prosecution.

JUANGONZALEZ: Now, of these four men, three were held for years, never charged, and then released, and one is still in Guantánamo? Could you talk a little bit about them?

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Sure. And in fact, none of the four men, including the man who’s been in Guantánamo now for nine-and-a-half years, none of them have been charged with anything. The case of Sami el-Hajj, he was a journalist for Al Jazeera. Murat Kurnaz, who you’ve just heard his story. Muhammed Khan Tumani, he and his father were arrested in Pakistan. All of the arrests of these four men occurred in Pakistan. Muhammed was only 17 at the time he was detained. And he was kept in solitary confinement for a good deal of the time that he was in Guantánamo and suffered psychological torture, physical torture. And I think it’s important to remember that, even after release, these men continue to suffer the scars of their detention, both because of the aftermath, the mental effects of the torture, and also because of the stigma that’s attached to them. They have restrictions on their travel. Muhammed Khan Tumani cannot travel to see his father, who has also been released. And that is continued harm.

AMYGOODMAN: When you were at Guantánamo, Murat Kurnaz, what exactly happened to you there? And did you say you were sold to the Americans in Pakistan?

MURATKURNAZ: When I arrived into American custody, so, they was not interested who I am. They just forced me to agree that I’m the member of al-Qaeda and that I’m the terrorist. So, they forced me to sign papers, I should agree that I’m the member of al-Qaeda. And because I refused to sign those kind of papers, they never stopped the torture. They tortured me by electroshocks and by waterboarding and different kinds, all kinds. They—every day, they came and beat me up for not signing those papers.

AMYGOODMAN: And you refused to the end?

MURATKURNAZ: Yes, of course. They tried this for five years, and I refused to sign, five years long. Even on the day of my—on the day when they released me, they brought me those kinds of papers and told me, "If you don’t sign now, you will not leave this place, and you will stay five more years." And they tried to make me sign even in the last few minutes during my detention in Guantánamo.

JUANGONZALEZ: And how long were you detained before your family or your loved ones even knew where you were or what had happened to you?

MURATKURNAZ: I even didn’t—for the first three or four years, I did not know that I had a lawyer, and I even didn’t know if my family knows that I’m alive in Guantánamo, so—because we was not allowed to have any phone call or family visits and to read the newspaper or to watch news. So that mean we didn’t know what’s going on in the out world. I even didn’t know that there is a war in Iraq and between the U.S.A. and Iran. So I really didn’t know anything about my own case. Nothing.

AMYGOODMAN: Did the Red Cross visit you?

MURATKURNAZ: The Red Cross, they came a few times, but they was not authorized to send any kind of postcards, if it’s got not—if it’s not gotten approved by the American U.S. Army, so...

AMYGOODMAN: Who waterboarded you?

MURATKURNAZ: The soldiers and the interrogator.

AMYGOODMAN: How often?

MURATKURNAZ: With waterboarding, that was just one time. It’s actually not called waterboarding. It’s a kind of waterboarding. It’s really called "water treatment." There’s a difference between waterboarding and water treatment. So, the water treatment means they have some buckets, bucket over with—full with water. They stick my head into it, and I have handcuffs behind my back. Two soldiers, they hold me, and another one, he stick my head into this water. And in the same time, they hit me into my stomach, so I had to—I had to try—so, if you inhale all those water, it gives you the feeling of drowning into water. And the U.S. Army means that as a technique, adhering technique, so it’s—they believe they can reach a couple things with it, so...

JUANGONZALEZ: And Katherine Gallagher, the Amnesty call, at the same time, for President Bush to be indicted, the relationship of your case of these four men to this call by Amnesty, if any?

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Sure. Yeah, what’s been amazing here is we’ve seen a unified call from human rights organizations, from legal groups, for prosecution. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the CCIJ, the Canadian Center for International Justice, we have actually twice already tried to solicit the attorney general of Canada to open an investigation over the past three weeks, in the same way that Amnesty has. And for all of these calls that have gone in to the attorney general, he thus far has shown no willingness to investigate or prosecute George Bush. That is why today we are taking this step to initiate the prosecution ourselves on behalf of these four men. And Amnesty will be out on the street today. I think we’re seeing Occupy Wall Street move to Occupy Surrey today. And we will need to keep calls going in to the attorney general of Canada to support this case, now that it will be in the court today.

AMYGOODMAN: So it’s called a private prosecution?

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Yes. What is being done is, an information is being laid that will be a sworn information. And once that is completed, the case will be transferred over to a provincial judge in Surrey. And we need, then, the attorney general, after eight days, to certify this case to proceed. In the meantime, we will be asking for an immediate hearing to be able to present the case of these four men and the case against George Bush. And should Canada not be willing to allow this case to proceed, we will then go to the United Nations and ask them to review the actions of Canada, which has an obligation as a signatory under the Convention against Torture to investigate and prosecute torture in their country.

AMYGOODMAN: What about here? You’re talking about doing this in Canada, trying to get President Bush arrested. President Bush lives in the United States. And then there’s a second question: one of the men you’re talking about doing this on behalf of is still at Guantánamo. President Obama is also here.

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Mm-hmm, yes. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are not able to initiate private prosecutions. We have called on, and continue to call on, and will continue to present evidence to the attorney general, Eric Holder, and ask him to uphold the United States’ obligations, because, of course, we have been in breach of our obligations under the Convention against Torture. So this fight against impunity needs to be fought domestically, I absolutely agree, and internationally. Today we are turning to our partners in the north to help us close the impunity gap. And we hope to see that take place.

AMYGOODMAN: Murat Kurnaz, when did you come out of Guantánamo? And how have you been able to adjust? How long has it been?

MURATKURNAZ: It’s already five years ago that I got released. So I have—I got released in 2006.

AMYGOODMAN: And how have you adjusted? How have you adjusted, Murat? How have you been able to make the transition out of Guantánamo, psychologically and physically?

MURATKURNAZ: Oh, I had—I, myself, I have not any problems, psychologically problems, but that does not mean that all other ones feel the same. So, there are many other prisoners who got released, and they have big problems with it. They have psychological or physical problems. And so, I, myself, I feel psychologically OK. But I don’t know how it comes to this, but I am happy that I have family here in Germany, so as soon as I got released, they picked me up, and everything was well.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Katherine Gallagher, didn’t something like this happen when President Bush wanted to go to Switzerland? And what happened to him there? He didn’t go.

KATHERINEGALLAGHER: Yes. In February of this year, we were working to file a case there on behalf of two Guantánamo detainees—one former, one current detainee. And there were protests that were being planned there. And on the day that we made the announcement of a press conference to announce the case, George Bush canceled his trip. Here, we will see George Bush, I think, arrive in Canada today.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us, Katherine Gallagher of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Murat Kurnaz, thank you very much for joining us. He’s joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Germany. He is a Turkish national who was born in Germany, detained in Pakistan at the age of 19 in 2001, held at Guantánamo for years.

And I want to bring our viewers and listeners this update. An NTC spokesman is telling Sky News that Muammar Gaddafi is dead, and the body is arriving in Misurata any minute now, The Guardian newspaper is reporting. We cannot confirm this. And The Guardian is also showing an image that—from a mobile phone, that shows the arrest of Gaddafi. Again, we are showing this at democracynow.org. These are extremely graphic images. For our radio listening audience around the world, it is a picture of Gaddafi, extremely bloody. And that’s the latest that we have so far. Again, the reports, a NTC spokesperson saying that Gaddafi is dead and that the body will be arriving in Misurata any moment.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, detentions in the United States of immigrants are at an all-time high. More than a million immigrants have been deported under President Obama. Stay with us.

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Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400Genocide-Linked General Otto Pérez Molina Poised to Become Guatemala's Next Presidenthttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/15/genocide_linked_general_otto_prez_molina
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-15:en/story/6d51de JUAN GONZALEZ : We turn now to Guatemala, where a retired military general has won the first round in the country&#8217;s presidential election. He faces a runoff election in November. If elected, General Otto Pérez Molina would become the first former military official to win the presidency since the end of the military dictatorships in 1986. Human rights groups have accused Pérez of being directly involved in the systematic use of torture and acts of genocide in Guatemala in the 1980s. Pérez has run largely on a platform of using an iron fist to crack down on drug cartels.
GEN . OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA : [translated] This is a rite that I accept, that I am going to fight with character and with a firm hand in front of the institutions to bring peace and security and defend the lives of all Guatemalans so we can live with security as we deserve.
AMY GOODMAN : Some news accounts have cited voters who say they support Molina in the hopes that he&#8217;ll help restore law order to the country, which has been ravaged by violence. Nearly 6,000 people were killed last year in Guatemala, a nation slightly smaller than Tennessee in size, with a population of about 14 million.
Well, to discuss the elections and their implications, we&#8217;re joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a guerrilla commander, a Mayan commandante and guerrilla, was disappeared—in Guatemala, was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. She&#8217;s the author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala , has spent decades pressing for classified information on her husband&#8217;s case. She has new evidence linking General Otto Pérez Molina, the leading presidential candidate, with her husband&#8217;s death.
Talk about the significance of his win in the first round of the elections, Jennifer.
JENNIFER HARBURY : Well, we&#8217;re all extremely concerned, given his background in human rights violations in Guatemala. He&#8217;s always declared that he was not involved in the genocidal campaign of 1982 in the Quiché Highlands, but in fact a video showing Allan Nairn interviewing him, precisely as he stands over several battered corpses, has been making the rounds in Guatemala. He was a major at the time. And this, of course, was the year when 70 to 90 percent of the villages in the Ixil Triangle were razed. He also appears or is named in a WikiLeaked cable by Ambassador McFarland, in which he admits that he was up there and in a command position, even though he was using the name of Tito Arias.
In my husband&#8217;s case, of course, if we take all of the documents together, including some telegrams that I recently received from the Guatemalan military, it shows that Everardo, my husband, was helicoptered, directly after his capture, directly into a huge meeting of high-level intelligence and other military officers, between 50 and 80, according to different documents, at the Santa Ana Berlin base, which was the central headquarters for the military operations at the time. At that meeting, the decision was made, with Pérez Molina present and also his direct—the person directly in charge of him and the head of the Estado Mayor of the Defensa Nacional, General Perussina—the decision was made to place Everardo in a special intelligence prisoner of war program, by which the prisoner was tortured long term, without killing him, in order to break him psychologically and force him to collaborate. Who was head of intelligence at that moment was Otto Pérez Molina. He was at that meeting. And in order to conceal those facts so that the human rights community would not intervene, given that they had just signed the human rights accords on human rights as part of the peace process, they decided at that meeting to kill a young soldier, place him at the combat site, and later falsely claim that that was the body of my husband, in order to prevent that intervention.
The rest of the documents show that, in 1992 and 1993, while Otto Pérez Molina was head of intelligence, that not only was Everardo taken from intelligence compound to intelligence compound to intelligence compound, tortured by intelligence specialists, and transported in intelligence helicopters, and held for a long time—and probably killed—at the intelligence death squad base in the capital, but there were 300 to 350 other prisoners of war in the same conditions, being thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., etc. By the time the United States embassy told the truth about what was happening, of course, all of those people were killed. And I think it&#8217;s very important to note that the embassy is still protecting Otto Pérez Molina, suggesting that somehow the evidence hasn&#8217;t stuck. The evidence has never been allowed to go to courts, in fact. And they seem to insinuate that Mr. Pérez Molina really wasn&#8217;t involved and is the great reformist.
JUAN GONZALEZ : But the WikiLeaks cables do indicate that the State Department officials are concerned about the impact on Pérez Molina and another one of the former colonels of that day, as they see them now as the great political hopes in the current times.
JENNIFER HARBURY : Well, Pérez Molina, of course, trained at the School of the Americas. Allan Nairn&#8217;s article presents some strong evidence that he was probably a CIA link, which I think is most likely. He was head of intelligence, and he rose to power at that time, and, again, was trained in the United States and has excellent relationships with the United States. So I think that&#8217;s probably true.
I think one other thing that&#8217;s of great concern to remember with the election is that he was up in the Nebaj and Ixil Triangle in a position of command throughout the massacres. In this coming election, a large percentage of the Mayan survivors will not be able to vote because of de facto Jim Crow laws. In the &#8217;90s, that number was half of the indigenous women and between a quarter to a third of the men. The numbers are better now, I believe, but no one in Guatemala, including the electoral board, has been able to produce those statistics. They seem to toss those out as not really relevant. In addition, people forced into exile, hundreds of thousands, a large percentage of them will not be able to vote, either. And in addition to that, Pérez Molina has managed to kick Sandra Torres, his only realistic opponent, off the ballot. So, to say the least, this is a very skewed election.
The New York Times article suggested that people would vote for Pérez Molina because they wanted an iron fist to combat the rising violence, but most of that is being carried out by military leaders who took their uniforms off after the war, created large mafias to run drugs, and hired and trained gangs such as the Zetas—that&#8217;s very well documented—to help them run the drugs.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And this is a phenomenon that—not only in Guatemala, but Salvador has had a similar problem.
JENNIFER HARBURY : That&#8217;s the model.
JUAN GONZALEZ : An escalation of violence once the war has ended, as many of these former soldiers and death squad people then became involved in narcotrafficking.
JENNIFER HARBURY : That&#8217;s correct. And the kinds of assassinations and mutilations that we&#8217;re seeing are almost like signature killings from straight out of the &#8217;80s. And in fact, the head of the survivor network in the Nebaj area was tortured to death only recently, as a sort of de facto warning that people should not press the 10 paradigmatic cases. The next one up at bat is genocide.
AMY GOODMAN : In a moment, we&#8217;re going to talk about a new documentary that&#8217;s just premiering in New York called Granito , but, Jennifer, you have been on this, trying to discover what happened to your husband, and through him, what happened to so many for decades. The information you have now about Otto Pérez Molina, you have fasted for information in front of the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, you risked death numerous times. How significant is this? And what about the fact you have this, as it looks like Pérez Molina will be the next president of Guatemala?
JENNIFER HARBURY : We believe that the 10 paradigmatic cases of war crimes, which the international community and the Inter-American Court has been backing to try to break the impunity for once and for all, so that people don&#8217;t continue to kill. Right now, no problem. It&#8217;s one of the highest murder rates in the world. But everyone knows nothing is going to be done about it. But we believe that once Otto Pérez Molina comes into the presidency, he&#8217;ll get rid of Claudia Paz, the fantastic and brilliant new attorney general, and stack all of the courts. And the killings of judges and witnesses and people like myself will, of course, increase to the point that the whole aperture for de facto Nuremberg for Guatemala, which is so crucial, we think that Nuremberg will shut down.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you afraid to go back to Guatemala?
JENNIFER HARBURY : Well, Otto Pérez Molina told the ambassador, McFarland, that he was very worried that his political opponents would have me killed &quot;to make me look bad.&quot; And I was almost arrested recently on the grounds that I should not have pushed the Inter-American ruling requiring the case to be reopened, among other things. So—but I will go back down, because what am I facing compared to the Guatemalans, like Fredy Peccerelli here? Nothing.
AMY GOODMAN : And we&#8217;re going to talk with Fredy, as well as Pam Yates, the filmmaker, and Jennifer Harbury, when we come back. Jennifer Harbury, human rights lawyer, widow of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, went on hunger strikes in Guatemala City and Washington to press for classified information about her husband&#8217;s case, author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala , and also the book Truth, Torture, and the American Way . This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. JUANGONZALEZ: We turn now to Guatemala, where a retired military general has won the first round in the country’s presidential election. He faces a runoff election in November. If elected, General Otto Pérez Molina would become the first former military official to win the presidency since the end of the military dictatorships in 1986. Human rights groups have accused Pérez of being directly involved in the systematic use of torture and acts of genocide in Guatemala in the 1980s. Pérez has run largely on a platform of using an iron fist to crack down on drug cartels.

GEN. OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: [translated] This is a rite that I accept, that I am going to fight with character and with a firm hand in front of the institutions to bring peace and security and defend the lives of all Guatemalans so we can live with security as we deserve.

AMYGOODMAN: Some news accounts have cited voters who say they support Molina in the hopes that he’ll help restore law order to the country, which has been ravaged by violence. Nearly 6,000 people were killed last year in Guatemala, a nation slightly smaller than Tennessee in size, with a population of about 14 million.

Well, to discuss the elections and their implications, we’re joined by human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a guerrilla commander, a Mayan commandante and guerrilla, was disappeared—in Guatemala, was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. She’s the author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala, has spent decades pressing for classified information on her husband’s case. She has new evidence linking General Otto Pérez Molina, the leading presidential candidate, with her husband’s death.

Talk about the significance of his win in the first round of the elections, Jennifer.

JENNIFERHARBURY: Well, we’re all extremely concerned, given his background in human rights violations in Guatemala. He’s always declared that he was not involved in the genocidal campaign of 1982 in the Quiché Highlands, but in fact a video showing Allan Nairn interviewing him, precisely as he stands over several battered corpses, has been making the rounds in Guatemala. He was a major at the time. And this, of course, was the year when 70 to 90 percent of the villages in the Ixil Triangle were razed. He also appears or is named in a WikiLeaked cable by Ambassador McFarland, in which he admits that he was up there and in a command position, even though he was using the name of Tito Arias.

In my husband’s case, of course, if we take all of the documents together, including some telegrams that I recently received from the Guatemalan military, it shows that Everardo, my husband, was helicoptered, directly after his capture, directly into a huge meeting of high-level intelligence and other military officers, between 50 and 80, according to different documents, at the Santa Ana Berlin base, which was the central headquarters for the military operations at the time. At that meeting, the decision was made, with Pérez Molina present and also his direct—the person directly in charge of him and the head of the Estado Mayor of the Defensa Nacional, General Perussina—the decision was made to place Everardo in a special intelligence prisoner of war program, by which the prisoner was tortured long term, without killing him, in order to break him psychologically and force him to collaborate. Who was head of intelligence at that moment was Otto Pérez Molina. He was at that meeting. And in order to conceal those facts so that the human rights community would not intervene, given that they had just signed the human rights accords on human rights as part of the peace process, they decided at that meeting to kill a young soldier, place him at the combat site, and later falsely claim that that was the body of my husband, in order to prevent that intervention.

The rest of the documents show that, in 1992 and 1993, while Otto Pérez Molina was head of intelligence, that not only was Everardo taken from intelligence compound to intelligence compound to intelligence compound, tortured by intelligence specialists, and transported in intelligence helicopters, and held for a long time—and probably killed—at the intelligence death squad base in the capital, but there were 300 to 350 other prisoners of war in the same conditions, being thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., etc. By the time the United States embassy told the truth about what was happening, of course, all of those people were killed. And I think it’s very important to note that the embassy is still protecting Otto Pérez Molina, suggesting that somehow the evidence hasn’t stuck. The evidence has never been allowed to go to courts, in fact. And they seem to insinuate that Mr. Pérez Molina really wasn’t involved and is the great reformist.

JUANGONZALEZ: But the WikiLeaks cables do indicate that the State Department officials are concerned about the impact on Pérez Molina and another one of the former colonels of that day, as they see them now as the great political hopes in the current times.

JENNIFERHARBURY: Well, Pérez Molina, of course, trained at the School of the Americas. Allan Nairn’s article presents some strong evidence that he was probably a CIA link, which I think is most likely. He was head of intelligence, and he rose to power at that time, and, again, was trained in the United States and has excellent relationships with the United States. So I think that’s probably true.

I think one other thing that’s of great concern to remember with the election is that he was up in the Nebaj and Ixil Triangle in a position of command throughout the massacres. In this coming election, a large percentage of the Mayan survivors will not be able to vote because of de facto Jim Crow laws. In the ’90s, that number was half of the indigenous women and between a quarter to a third of the men. The numbers are better now, I believe, but no one in Guatemala, including the electoral board, has been able to produce those statistics. They seem to toss those out as not really relevant. In addition, people forced into exile, hundreds of thousands, a large percentage of them will not be able to vote, either. And in addition to that, Pérez Molina has managed to kick Sandra Torres, his only realistic opponent, off the ballot. So, to say the least, this is a very skewed election.

The New York Times article suggested that people would vote for Pérez Molina because they wanted an iron fist to combat the rising violence, but most of that is being carried out by military leaders who took their uniforms off after the war, created large mafias to run drugs, and hired and trained gangs such as the Zetas—that’s very well documented—to help them run the drugs.

JUANGONZALEZ: And this is a phenomenon that—not only in Guatemala, but Salvador has had a similar problem.

JENNIFERHARBURY: That’s the model.

JUANGONZALEZ: An escalation of violence once the war has ended, as many of these former soldiers and death squad people then became involved in narcotrafficking.

JENNIFERHARBURY: That’s correct. And the kinds of assassinations and mutilations that we’re seeing are almost like signature killings from straight out of the ’80s. And in fact, the head of the survivor network in the Nebaj area was tortured to death only recently, as a sort of de facto warning that people should not press the 10 paradigmatic cases. The next one up at bat is genocide.

AMYGOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to talk about a new documentary that’s just premiering in New York called Granito, but, Jennifer, you have been on this, trying to discover what happened to your husband, and through him, what happened to so many for decades. The information you have now about Otto Pérez Molina, you have fasted for information in front of the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, you risked death numerous times. How significant is this? And what about the fact you have this, as it looks like Pérez Molina will be the next president of Guatemala?

JENNIFERHARBURY: We believe that the 10 paradigmatic cases of war crimes, which the international community and the Inter-American Court has been backing to try to break the impunity for once and for all, so that people don’t continue to kill. Right now, no problem. It’s one of the highest murder rates in the world. But everyone knows nothing is going to be done about it. But we believe that once Otto Pérez Molina comes into the presidency, he’ll get rid of Claudia Paz, the fantastic and brilliant new attorney general, and stack all of the courts. And the killings of judges and witnesses and people like myself will, of course, increase to the point that the whole aperture for de facto Nuremberg for Guatemala, which is so crucial, we think that Nuremberg will shut down.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you afraid to go back to Guatemala?

JENNIFERHARBURY: Well, Otto Pérez Molina told the ambassador, McFarland, that he was very worried that his political opponents would have me killed "to make me look bad." And I was almost arrested recently on the grounds that I should not have pushed the Inter-American ruling requiring the case to be reopened, among other things. So—but I will go back down, because what am I facing compared to the Guatemalans, like Fredy Peccerelli here? Nothing.

AMYGOODMAN: And we’re going to talk with Fredy, as well as Pam Yates, the filmmaker, and Jennifer Harbury, when we come back. Jennifer Harbury, human rights lawyer, widow of Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, went on hunger strikes in Guatemala City and Washington to press for classified information about her husband’s case, author of Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala, and also the book Truth, Torture, and the American Way. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400"Granito: How to Nail a Dictator": New Film Tracks Struggle for Justice After Guatemalan Genocidehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/15/granito_how_to_nail_a_dictator
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-15:en/story/25f87a JUAN GONZALEZ : A new documentary about Guatemala links the country&#8217;s turbulent past with those, like General Otto Pérez Molina, who are active players in its present. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator , part political thriller, part memoir, spans four decades. It follows several people, including the film&#8217;s director, Pamela Yates, as they search for the details that can be used to hold accountable those responsible for genocide. This is a portion of the film&#8217;s trailer.
PAMELA YATES : Ever since I filmed these generals in 1982, I&#8217;ve wanted to see them pay for their crimes.
KATE DOYLE : It is so hard to nail senior military officers who ordered this. When you want to indict a dictator, you need evidence.
PAMELA YATES : Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker, capturing moments in time, never knowing how history will judge them.
FREDY PECCERELLI : People have it in their minds that anyone can be killed in Guatemala for nothing.
ALMUDENA BERNABEU : When I think about defendants, I get really angry. You know, I get really pissed.
FREDY PECCERELLI : It came in addressed to me. So it says, &quot;Freddie sic , [translated] we&#8217;re watching your kids&#8217; schools and where you work. We&#8217;ll scatter your parts throughout the city.&quot;
ANTONIO CABA CABA : [translated] We&#8217;ll never remain silent. Ríos Montt wants to silent us, but he can&#8217;t. My name has a meaning. Antonio is the one who confronts the enemy.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] If we Maya people don&#8217;t unite, we won&#8217;t survive.
FREDY PECCERELLI : So when we come along and do this kind of work, they&#8217;re afraid. They&#8217;re afraid. And they should be afraid, because we&#8217;re coming after them.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s an excerpt from the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator . Opened here in New York at the IFC last night. For more, we&#8217;re joined by the director, Pamela Yates. She narrates the film&#8217;s central story about the search for evidence of Guatemala&#8217;s genocide, much of it drawn from footage she filmed in 1982 for her award-winning documentary When the Mountains Tremble . At least 200,000 Guatemalans died during the genocide.
We&#8217;re also joined by Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation. In the film, he leads teams to unearth mass graves in a search for those killed by the military, all the while facing threats himself from clandestine groups that want the truth to stay buried. He&#8217;s who you just heard in that trailer.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now!
PAMELA YATES : Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : Pam, this latest film, talk about its significance in light of the presidential elections that are taking place right now.
PAMELA YATES : Well, Granito is really about the importance of human rights documentation, not just as a filmmaker and going into all of my filmic outtakes from 1982 to find additional evidence for the case in Spain and the cases in Guatemala, but also the other human rights defenders—Fredy Peccerelli, who&#8217;s been finding and looking for scientific, forensic evidence, Kate Doyle, who is going through secret military and police documents to find evidence, including evidence against Otto Pérez Molina, who is part of Plan Sofía, one of the documents that was leaked to her and which you see in Granito . So the big idea of the film is when—how important it is to continue to document and how important this documentation is for evidence in the cases.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Pamela, in the film, you talk about how difficult it has been to prove that former president and general, Efraín Ríos Montt, knew what the Guatamalan military was doing, when the government denied any knowledge of the genocide and said there were no army records. I want to play a clip from Granito , when forensic scientist Kate Doyle explains how she was approached by someone in Guatemala with a package that contained information that would prove especially useful in documenting the counterinsurgency sweep.
KATE DOYLE : Plan Sofía is a collection of documents that were created in July and August of 1982, documenting a counterinsurgency sweep that took place in central Quiché. It describes the mission of the operation as the extermination of subversive elements in the area. It&#8217;s very much a product of the Ríos Montt army. This patrol report was created in order to show the commander that they did what they were told. This is exactly the kind of communication that we need to prove that there was a two-way flow of information and that the high command was not ignorant of what the patrols on the ground were doing. From the perspective of a prosecutor or an investigator, it is so hard to nail the intellectual authors of these crimes. It is so hard to nail the senior military officers who ordered this. So Plan Sofía is a very significant, explosive document.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Kate Doyle, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, in the film Granito . Pam Yates, why do the film now, following up, what, how many decades after you did your first film?
PAMELA YATES : I think it was really because the international attorneys in the genocide case being heard in the Spanish national court asked me to go into all of my filmic outtakes. And—
AMY GOODMAN : And explain that more, the Spain case.
PAMELA YATES : The Spain case is a case under the principle of universal jurisdiction, where some crimes are so horrible, like genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, that if they&#8217;re not being prosecuted in the country of origin, that any country in the world that signed the Genocide Convention should be able to take on and prosecute those criminals.
But one of the effects that the Spanish national court case has had is that it has emboldened judges and prosecutors in Guatemala to pursue their own cases for genocide. And in fact, the first army officer in the history of Latin America has just been arrested in June for genocide. So we&#8217;re beginning to see a tipping point for justice, one of the things that Jennifer said would stop if Otto Pérez Molina were elected.
But I believe, and I think the sense of granito , which is that we all have a tiny grain of sand to contribute to this judicial process or positive social change, means that we really have to support this tipping point for justice in Guatemala, both inside the country and from outside the country. And we hope that Granito , the film, will contribute to this.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Fredy Peccerelli, you&#8217;ve been involved in this now for quite some time in terms of digging up the scientific evidence of how the genocide occurred and who were the victims. Could you talk about how you got involved? And, of course, these days, the wars are forgotten in Central America, and now everyone assumes that it&#8217;s a new day. But the threats that you&#8217;ve been facing, if you could talk about that, as well?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Well, I got involved—and I used to live in New York, and I—my family fled here in 1980 because of death threats to my father. And eventually, when I was in Brooklyn College, I sort of wanted to reconnect with Guatemala and found Dr. Clyde Snow, who invited me to go to Guatemala and take a course with the team. And eventually I stayed there for 16-and-a-half years. During that time, we&#8217;ve exhumed over 1,400 different communities where these massacres or extrajudicial executions occurred. And as a result, we have been getting death threats for the last 10 years. The most recent ones come immediately after the sentencing of the four military personnel, ex-Kaibiles, in the Dos Erres massacre. About four days later, we got a death threat written in—handwritten in red ink, telling us—
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to a clip that has you reading one of these death threats. You talk about this threatening letter that was sent to your workplace. This is from Granito . It&#8217;s Fredy.
FREDY PECCERELLI : It came addressed to me. So it says, &quot;Freddie sic , [translated] now we have what we wanted, all the information in our hands. Today you will all pay, sons of [bleep]. We have pictures and information of your family. We know your kids&#8217; schools and where you work. Your days are numbered. The Forensic Anthropologists Foundation won&#8217;t ever be able to do anything. Two or three armored cars won&#8217;t save you. Your family will pay for everything. Damned revolutionary sons of [bleep]. Your bodies will land in graves. We&#8217;ll scatter you in pieces throughout the city. Your family, sons, nephews, sister and parents, will pay for everything, son of a [bleep]. The forensic anthropologists will pay.&quot; And it finishes by saying, &quot;Death.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Fredy Peccerelli in Granito , the forensic anthropologist who will not stop. Fredy, who is threatening you?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Well, in reality, we don’t know. But the truth is that we believe it&#8217;s the military personnel that are afraid of the evidence that we&#8217;re presenting and that is being used against them in court trials. In this last death threat, we know it&#8217;s people that are linked to the military personnel that were found guilty and were sentenced to 6,060 years in jail each, 30 years for each one of the deaths and 30 years for crimes of lesser humanity. So it&#8217;s the people who committed the crimes that are threatening us, and they have let us know this.
JUAN GONZALEZ : I want to ask you, because we had in headlines the report about developments in Colombia, where the former head of Colombia&#8217;s secret police, the DAS , was sentenced to 25 years for his involvement in working with the death squads to supervise the killings, especially of a sociologist who was involved in investigating the death squads there. I wanted to ask you, as you&#8217;ve spent now 16 years, you say, doing this work in Guatemala, why, even in a country like Colombia, are some people being brought to justice for what&#8217;s happening, but yet in Guatemala, where the genocide was so much more extensive, it&#8217;s been so difficult to hold those who were the intellectual authors and the people supervising the killing responsible?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Well, in Guatemala, what has happened is pretty much blanket impunity after the signing of the peace accords. And people are afraid. The prosecutor’s office has not been moving forward with these cases &#39;til now that we have Claudia Paz y Paz, the new attorney general. And although there&#39;s evidence of the crimes, not only physical evidence but testimonial evidence, the prosecutors have been very afraid and have not gotten support. Most of the people who participated at a high level are also still in positions of power. General Efraín Ríos Montt still today is in congress. So that has contributed to a lack of justice.
AMY GOODMAN : Pam, the footage you have of Fredy and his team digging up these bodies—Fredy, if you can explain what exactly you&#8217;re doing, where are you finding these mass graves, and how are you identifying them?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Well, most of the mass graves that we&#8217;ve dug up during the last 19 years are in the communities in the highlands. These are the victims of massacres. But recently, we&#8217;ve also found that a lot of the bodies of the people that were forcibly disappeared, after they were tortured—interrogated, tortured, they were executed and thrown in the streets of cities, Guatemala City being one of these cities. And then the bodies would be autopsied in some cases and taken to cemeteries, like La Verbena cemetery. What we&#8217;re doing now is we&#8217;re looking for the bodies of the people that were disappeared and buried as John or Jane Does or unidentified bodies. In La Verbena, what happened is, after they were buried in individual graves, after some time, because of lack of space, they take the bodies out, and they throw them in these huge bone wells. There&#8217;s four of them. So, so far, we&#8217;ve exhumed over 12,500 bodies. And we believe at least a thousand of those bodies are bodies of victims of forced disappearance.
AMY GOODMAN : And the connections to September 11th every which way, the election that led to the—well, this runoff election was September 11th, that elected Pérez Molina, though he has to go through another election, and the scientific—the tools you&#8217;re using come from 9/11.
FREDY PECCERELLI : That is correct. We are using M-FISys. It’s a software developed by the company Gene Codes. It was developed for the identification of the victims of 9/11. This software was donated to the foundation so we can compare the genetic profiles from the victims, the skeletons, to the genetic profiles of the families. So, now the fact that I grew up in New York and I saw the effort put in to identify the victims on 9/11, I thought was important in my decision of looking for the victims of forced disappearance in Guatemala. And we&#8217;ve taken the technology and also the spirit of New York into Guatemala to look for the lost Guatemalans or the disappeared Guatemalans.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And this issue that some of the press reports here in the New York Times and other publications are talking about how support for Pérez Molina is coming largely from young people who have no knowledge of the situation that happened and the genocide of 30 years ago, but the violence that&#8217;s occurring now in the streets of Guatemala City, in Salvador and these other places, the impact of this and the connection to the wars and the genocide of the &#8217;80s?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Well, the connection is clear, because of the lack of justice in the crimes of the war in Guatemala. It has let people know that they can pretty much do anything and get away with anything in Guatemala. And that has propagated, you know, the drug cartels to become stronger, as well as the gangs and the Maras, who also become stronger and become tools in a political game to make it seem like there is no hope other than to elect a former general.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And the connection of the politicians with the drug cartels? Because apparently not just Pérez Molina has been implicated, but several other candidates who were running for president, as well.
FREDY PECCERELLI : Yes, according to the press, there&#8217;s connections to the drug cartels everywhere in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : And are you afraid, if Pérez Molina is elected, of it making your identification of these bodies and digging more difficult, more death threats coming?
FREDY PECCERELLI : Of course. Of course we&#8217;re afraid. Because of his direct ties to the conflict, it would only seem logical that he is not interested in us doing this work. Nonetheless, I do have to say that we have been able to work even when the FRG , which is Efraín Ríos Montt&#8217;s party, was in power. So, I think the work is too powerful to be shut down, but individually, yes, we&#8217;re afraid.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. The film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is playing at the IFC here in New York. It just premiered last night. These days that it is here in New York determine whether it will be seen in cinemas around the country. It is a remarkable film. It is called Granito , which means grain of sand, How to Nail a Dictator . Fredy Peccerelli, thanks so much for being with us, and Pam Yates, for doing this film and all the work that you have done. JUANGONZALEZ: A new documentary about Guatemala links the country’s turbulent past with those, like General Otto Pérez Molina, who are active players in its present. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, part political thriller, part memoir, spans four decades. It follows several people, including the film’s director, Pamela Yates, as they search for the details that can be used to hold accountable those responsible for genocide. This is a portion of the film’s trailer.

PAMELAYATES: Ever since I filmed these generals in 1982, I’ve wanted to see them pay for their crimes.

KATEDOYLE: It is so hard to nail senior military officers who ordered this. When you want to indict a dictator, you need evidence.

PAMELAYATES: Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker, capturing moments in time, never knowing how history will judge them.

FREDYPECCERELLI: People have it in their minds that anyone can be killed in Guatemala for nothing.

ALMUDENABERNABEU: When I think about defendants, I get really angry. You know, I get really pissed.

FREDYPECCERELLI: It came in addressed to me. So it says, "Freddie sic, [translated] we’re watching your kids’ schools and where you work. We’ll scatter your parts throughout the city."

ANTONIOCABACABA: [translated] We’ll never remain silent. Ríos Montt wants to silent us, but he can’t. My name has a meaning. Antonio is the one who confronts the enemy.

RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: [translated] If we Maya people don’t unite, we won’t survive.

FREDYPECCERELLI: So when we come along and do this kind of work, they’re afraid. They’re afraid. And they should be afraid, because we’re coming after them.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s an excerpt from the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator. Opened here in New York at the IFC last night. For more, we’re joined by the director, Pamela Yates. She narrates the film’s central story about the search for evidence of Guatemala’s genocide, much of it drawn from footage she filmed in 1982 for her award-winning documentary When the Mountains Tremble. At least 200,000 Guatemalans died during the genocide.

We’re also joined by Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation. In the film, he leads teams to unearth mass graves in a search for those killed by the military, all the while facing threats himself from clandestine groups that want the truth to stay buried. He’s who you just heard in that trailer.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now!

PAMELAYATES: Thank you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: Pam, this latest film, talk about its significance in light of the presidential elections that are taking place right now.

PAMELAYATES: Well, Granito is really about the importance of human rights documentation, not just as a filmmaker and going into all of my filmic outtakes from 1982 to find additional evidence for the case in Spain and the cases in Guatemala, but also the other human rights defenders—Fredy Peccerelli, who’s been finding and looking for scientific, forensic evidence, Kate Doyle, who is going through secret military and police documents to find evidence, including evidence against Otto Pérez Molina, who is part of Plan Sofía, one of the documents that was leaked to her and which you see in Granito. So the big idea of the film is when—how important it is to continue to document and how important this documentation is for evidence in the cases.

JUANGONZALEZ: Pamela, in the film, you talk about how difficult it has been to prove that former president and general, Efraín Ríos Montt, knew what the Guatamalan military was doing, when the government denied any knowledge of the genocide and said there were no army records. I want to play a clip from Granito, when forensic scientist Kate Doyle explains how she was approached by someone in Guatemala with a package that contained information that would prove especially useful in documenting the counterinsurgency sweep.

KATEDOYLE: Plan Sofía is a collection of documents that were created in July and August of 1982, documenting a counterinsurgency sweep that took place in central Quiché. It describes the mission of the operation as the extermination of subversive elements in the area. It’s very much a product of the Ríos Montt army. This patrol report was created in order to show the commander that they did what they were told. This is exactly the kind of communication that we need to prove that there was a two-way flow of information and that the high command was not ignorant of what the patrols on the ground were doing. From the perspective of a prosecutor or an investigator, it is so hard to nail the intellectual authors of these crimes. It is so hard to nail the senior military officers who ordered this. So Plan Sofía is a very significant, explosive document.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Kate Doyle, senior analyst with the National Security Archive, in the film Granito. Pam Yates, why do the film now, following up, what, how many decades after you did your first film?

PAMELAYATES: I think it was really because the international attorneys in the genocide case being heard in the Spanish national court asked me to go into all of my filmic outtakes. And—

AMYGOODMAN: And explain that more, the Spain case.

PAMELAYATES: The Spain case is a case under the principle of universal jurisdiction, where some crimes are so horrible, like genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, that if they’re not being prosecuted in the country of origin, that any country in the world that signed the Genocide Convention should be able to take on and prosecute those criminals.

But one of the effects that the Spanish national court case has had is that it has emboldened judges and prosecutors in Guatemala to pursue their own cases for genocide. And in fact, the first army officer in the history of Latin America has just been arrested in June for genocide. So we’re beginning to see a tipping point for justice, one of the things that Jennifer said would stop if Otto Pérez Molina were elected.

But I believe, and I think the sense of granito, which is that we all have a tiny grain of sand to contribute to this judicial process or positive social change, means that we really have to support this tipping point for justice in Guatemala, both inside the country and from outside the country. And we hope that Granito, the film, will contribute to this.

JUANGONZALEZ: Fredy Peccerelli, you’ve been involved in this now for quite some time in terms of digging up the scientific evidence of how the genocide occurred and who were the victims. Could you talk about how you got involved? And, of course, these days, the wars are forgotten in Central America, and now everyone assumes that it’s a new day. But the threats that you’ve been facing, if you could talk about that, as well?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Well, I got involved—and I used to live in New York, and I—my family fled here in 1980 because of death threats to my father. And eventually, when I was in Brooklyn College, I sort of wanted to reconnect with Guatemala and found Dr. Clyde Snow, who invited me to go to Guatemala and take a course with the team. And eventually I stayed there for 16-and-a-half years. During that time, we’ve exhumed over 1,400 different communities where these massacres or extrajudicial executions occurred. And as a result, we have been getting death threats for the last 10 years. The most recent ones come immediately after the sentencing of the four military personnel, ex-Kaibiles, in the Dos Erres massacre. About four days later, we got a death threat written in—handwritten in red ink, telling us—

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to a clip that has you reading one of these death threats. You talk about this threatening letter that was sent to your workplace. This is from Granito. It’s Fredy.

FREDYPECCERELLI: It came addressed to me. So it says, "Freddie sic, [translated] now we have what we wanted, all the information in our hands. Today you will all pay, sons of [bleep]. We have pictures and information of your family. We know your kids’ schools and where you work. Your days are numbered. The Forensic Anthropologists Foundation won’t ever be able to do anything. Two or three armored cars won’t save you. Your family will pay for everything. Damned revolutionary sons of [bleep]. Your bodies will land in graves. We’ll scatter you in pieces throughout the city. Your family, sons, nephews, sister and parents, will pay for everything, son of a [bleep]. The forensic anthropologists will pay." And it finishes by saying, "Death."

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Fredy Peccerelli in Granito, the forensic anthropologist who will not stop. Fredy, who is threatening you?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Well, in reality, we don’t know. But the truth is that we believe it’s the military personnel that are afraid of the evidence that we’re presenting and that is being used against them in court trials. In this last death threat, we know it’s people that are linked to the military personnel that were found guilty and were sentenced to 6,060 years in jail each, 30 years for each one of the deaths and 30 years for crimes of lesser humanity. So it’s the people who committed the crimes that are threatening us, and they have let us know this.

JUANGONZALEZ: I want to ask you, because we had in headlines the report about developments in Colombia, where the former head of Colombia’s secret police, the DAS, was sentenced to 25 years for his involvement in working with the death squads to supervise the killings, especially of a sociologist who was involved in investigating the death squads there. I wanted to ask you, as you’ve spent now 16 years, you say, doing this work in Guatemala, why, even in a country like Colombia, are some people being brought to justice for what’s happening, but yet in Guatemala, where the genocide was so much more extensive, it’s been so difficult to hold those who were the intellectual authors and the people supervising the killing responsible?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Well, in Guatemala, what has happened is pretty much blanket impunity after the signing of the peace accords. And people are afraid. The prosecutor’s office has not been moving forward with these cases 'til now that we have Claudia Paz y Paz, the new attorney general. And although there's evidence of the crimes, not only physical evidence but testimonial evidence, the prosecutors have been very afraid and have not gotten support. Most of the people who participated at a high level are also still in positions of power. General Efraín Ríos Montt still today is in congress. So that has contributed to a lack of justice.

AMYGOODMAN: Pam, the footage you have of Fredy and his team digging up these bodies—Fredy, if you can explain what exactly you’re doing, where are you finding these mass graves, and how are you identifying them?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Well, most of the mass graves that we’ve dug up during the last 19 years are in the communities in the highlands. These are the victims of massacres. But recently, we’ve also found that a lot of the bodies of the people that were forcibly disappeared, after they were tortured—interrogated, tortured, they were executed and thrown in the streets of cities, Guatemala City being one of these cities. And then the bodies would be autopsied in some cases and taken to cemeteries, like La Verbena cemetery. What we’re doing now is we’re looking for the bodies of the people that were disappeared and buried as John or Jane Does or unidentified bodies. In La Verbena, what happened is, after they were buried in individual graves, after some time, because of lack of space, they take the bodies out, and they throw them in these huge bone wells. There’s four of them. So, so far, we’ve exhumed over 12,500 bodies. And we believe at least a thousand of those bodies are bodies of victims of forced disappearance.

AMYGOODMAN: And the connections to September 11th every which way, the election that led to the—well, this runoff election was September 11th, that elected Pérez Molina, though he has to go through another election, and the scientific—the tools you’re using come from 9/11.

FREDYPECCERELLI: That is correct. We are using M-FISys. It’s a software developed by the company Gene Codes. It was developed for the identification of the victims of 9/11. This software was donated to the foundation so we can compare the genetic profiles from the victims, the skeletons, to the genetic profiles of the families. So, now the fact that I grew up in New York and I saw the effort put in to identify the victims on 9/11, I thought was important in my decision of looking for the victims of forced disappearance in Guatemala. And we’ve taken the technology and also the spirit of New York into Guatemala to look for the lost Guatemalans or the disappeared Guatemalans.

JUANGONZALEZ: And this issue that some of the press reports here in the New York Times and other publications are talking about how support for Pérez Molina is coming largely from young people who have no knowledge of the situation that happened and the genocide of 30 years ago, but the violence that’s occurring now in the streets of Guatemala City, in Salvador and these other places, the impact of this and the connection to the wars and the genocide of the ’80s?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Well, the connection is clear, because of the lack of justice in the crimes of the war in Guatemala. It has let people know that they can pretty much do anything and get away with anything in Guatemala. And that has propagated, you know, the drug cartels to become stronger, as well as the gangs and the Maras, who also become stronger and become tools in a political game to make it seem like there is no hope other than to elect a former general.

JUANGONZALEZ: And the connection of the politicians with the drug cartels? Because apparently not just Pérez Molina has been implicated, but several other candidates who were running for president, as well.

FREDYPECCERELLI: Yes, according to the press, there’s connections to the drug cartels everywhere in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: And are you afraid, if Pérez Molina is elected, of it making your identification of these bodies and digging more difficult, more death threats coming?

FREDYPECCERELLI: Of course. Of course we’re afraid. Because of his direct ties to the conflict, it would only seem logical that he is not interested in us doing this work. Nonetheless, I do have to say that we have been able to work even when the FRG, which is Efraín Ríos Montt’s party, was in power. So, I think the work is too powerful to be shut down, but individually, yes, we’re afraid.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. The film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is playing at the IFC here in New York. It just premiered last night. These days that it is here in New York determine whether it will be seen in cinemas around the country. It is a remarkable film. It is called Granito, which means grain of sand, How to Nail a Dictator. Fredy Peccerelli, thanks so much for being with us, and Pam Yates, for doing this film and all the work that you have done.

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Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400A Fateful Day: 9/11 Also Marks Important Anniversaries in India, Guatemala, Haiti and Attica, NYhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/8/a_fateful_day_9_11_also
tag:democracynow.org,2011-09-08:en/story/4ec20e AMY GOODMAN : Our guest at Duke University, in studio there, Ariel Dorfman, bestselling author, playwright, poet, survived September 11th, 1973, in Santiago, Chile, as we talk about other September 11ths, as well, in our continued series this week on this 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. We&#8217;re going to go back in time.
On September 11th this year, India marks the 105th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi launching the modern nonviolent resistance movement. Back on the centennial anniversary in 2006 , we spoke with Gandhi&#8217;s grandson Arun about Satyagraha. I asked him to explain what exactly his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, did on September 11th, 1906.
ARUN GANDHI : He met in the theater with more than 3,000 Indian people, because they were victims of prejudices in South Africa and all kinds of unjust laws were enacted to oppress them and suppress them. And he realized that this was not right and that we should not submit to these things and should not live with this. And so he got the people together and explained to them that we have to resist this kind of injustice, and we have to do something about it. We should not just submit to it and live with it.
And people were wondering, how can we resist with the state so powerful, and we don’t have any weapons, you know, because every time, even today, when somebody talks about resistance, everybody thinks in terms of weapons and war and fighting. And that’s when grandfather explained to them that we don’t need any weapons of mass destruction. We have the ability to respond to this nonviolently and with self-suffering. And that’s what he encouraged the people to do.
AMY GOODMAN : Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, describing September 11th, 1906.
JUAN GONZALEZ : On September 11, 1990, renowned Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack was assassinated in Guatemala City. She had been stalked for two weeks prior to her death by a U.S.-backed military death squad. Myrna had been targeted in retaliation for her pioneering field work, which had begun to expose and document the destruction of rural indigenous communities in Guatemala. Guatemala&#8217;s U.S.-backed state forces and allied paramilitary groups were responsible for tens of thousands of human rights violations, including attacks against indigenous populations. Myrna&#8217;s sister Helen Mack has fought tirelessly to bring justice to people who were killed by high-ranking Guatemalan officials in the armed forces. In 2003, Democracy Now! spoke to Helen Mack in Guatemala City.
HELEN MACK : Thirteen years ago, my sister was stabbed 27 times by the death squad from the Presidential High Command. And we&#8217;ve been trying to throw out the impunity, but on May 7th, the tribunal, even we had direct evidence of their responsibility, they were acquitted on May 7th of this year.
JUAN GONZALEZ : We asked Helen Mack about General Rios Montt coming back to political prominence in Guatemala, even after the peace accords were signed. Here&#8217;s what she had to say.
HELEN MACK : Well, it&#8217;s very terrible, because my sister was killed in the framework of the peace negotiations, and the army didn&#8217;t—never—never have accepted the peace agreements. And even the civilian government was wondering to humanize the conflict, the militaries didn&#8217;t. So she was killed in that framework. And now, they still don&#8217;t accept the peace agreements. Even her research and her studies were very useful for the resettlement agreement and other kind of agreements for the displaced people, they still rejected, and that&#8217;s why the peace agenda in Guatemala after eight years, it has been coming down.
AMY GOODMAN : Helen Mack, talking about her sister Myrna Mack, who died September 11th, 1990.
Then there was Steve Biko in South Africa. Steve Biko was being beaten to death in the back of a van, September 11th, 1977, by apartheid forces—unfortunately, U.S.-backed apartheid forces. He died in the early morning hours of September 12th, 1977.
And there was September 11th, 1993. In the midst of the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, Antoine Izméry, a Haitian businessman who had thrown in his lot with Lavalas, was dragged out of a church by coup forces. He was murdered in broad daylight. He had been commemorating a massacre of parishioners at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church that had occurred five years before, on September 11th, 1988. At the time, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide narrowly escaped death in that attack. He later became president of Haiti.
In 2004, I spoke with Haitian President Aristide aboard the flight back from the Central African Republic, when he was the victim of yet another U.S.-backed coup. I asked him to describe what happened to him and his parish on that day, September 11th, 1988, at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church.
PRESIDENT JEAN - BERTRAND ARISTIDE : We were praying. We were celebrating our faith in God. And for us, God means love, peace, justice, freedom, solidarity. Getting together to pray means empowering all those who share the same faith. If you stand up for justice, then you cannot close the eyes to not see poor people waiting to have jobs, to eat with dignity. Once you stand up for that, then you may have people not only rejecting you but also putting fire in a church, burning people. This is what happened that day, September 11, 1988.
When we had it elsewhere, not in a church, but in a country, like Chile and President Allende willing to stand up for human beings, for the rights to eat, the rights to go to school, the rights to have healthcare, and so and so, people who don’t care about human beings rejected that through coup d’état. When, on September 11, 2001, something tragical happened in the United States called terrorism, we saw the world rejecting terrorism, as if—when, for instance, we have Guy Philippe, Chamblain, well known as terrorists, drug dealers, convicted people, armed by those who pretend helping Haiti, to kill Haitians, it’s like if—it’s not anymore terrorism. So, racism somehow is linked to that cynical game.
AMY GOODMAN : That was former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide describing September 11, 1988, at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church. He survived that massacre. Five years later, Antoine Izméry was killed in the midst of a U.S.-backed coup in Haiti as he remembered that massacre. And I was speaking to President Aristide on his attempt to come back to Haiti more than seven years ago, when he was ousted in a coup, March of 2004. President Aristide has returned in the last months to Haiti after seven-and-a-half years in exile in South Africa.
Ariel Dorfman, you often remember these different September 11ths. Talk about their significance in understanding this 10th anniversary of another September 11th, of course, the one that the world does know about, September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people were killed in an instant in New York and in Washington in the September 11th attacks.
ARIEL DORFMAN : Yes, I have several thoughts about this. The first is that we have September 11ths happening every day, everywhere. In other words, there are constantly acts of terror against the people, against the innocent people. And we have to understand that we need to get out of the September 11th sort of syndrome. And I&#8217;m using this as a metaphor, right? It turns out that that day is very significant, because it brings together these two events in Chile and the United States, which are similar—the Tuesdays, the bombs from the air, the terror, etc. But as Aristide just pointed out and as Helen Mack pointed out and as Arun Gandhi pointed out, there are other September 11ths, as well. So that&#8217;s the first thing I would say is, let&#8217;s remember that.
A second issue has to do with the—something that comes out of Chile is—and it&#8217;s something good that comes out of the terrible tragedy we had—is that, eventually, we arrested the—in fact, the British government, at the petition of the Spanish authorities, arrested General Pinochet in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity and torture. And it set an incredible precedent, which is that former heads of state—and, in fact, heads of state—can be judged anywhere in the world where humanity exists—in other words, anywhere—for crimes against humanity. It&#8217;s not crimes against the Chilean people. When Pinochet ordered torture, he was torturing one person, he was torturing the whole world. And those crimes do not prescribe.
The reason I&#8217;m mentioning this at this moment is because a few days ago on ABC , Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff of Colin Powell, said that one of the things that Cheney, Richard Cheney, Dick Cheney, was afraid of was of being &quot;Pinocheted&quot; — in other words, being made Pinochet. Now, I had never heard the word &quot;Pinochet,&quot; which is a dread word for me, you know, a man who was responsible for so much death and suffering and destruction in my country, including my own life, I mean, which had been really exploded by him. That this man should not only become a noun, like saying, &quot;We want a Pinochet,&quot; which people say when they say basically they want law and order and destroying the trade unions and breaking the social security network and privatizing the social security, when they say that. But I had never heard it made into a verb, in other words, to Pinochet somebody. Now, to Pinochet somebody is not to do a coup now; to Pinochet somebody, in the case of Dick Cheney, is to be put on trial for crimes against humanity, for war crimes, which, of course, both Cheney and Bush should be. I doubt that they will be, but he certainly should worry about going to Spain or going to France or going to England, because he might end up in jail, or in the possibility that that should happen to him. So he obviously is trying to not be Pinocheted. And I like the fact that Cheney is now scared of Pinochet, of the ghost of Pinochet, having brought in a world where Pinochet would be proud and where Pinochet was very, very happy. You know, in 2001, he said, &quot;That proves how right we were,&quot; you know? So, that was one thing I just wanted to comment on.
And the last thing has to do with Gandhi. You know, I gave the Mandela lecture last year in South Africa and met up with the great hero and the great icon of our times, you know, Nelson Mandela. And it was wonderful to see how peaceful he was, even at 92 years old then, and how, though there was a military strategy on the part of the ANC , it was basically a nonviolent resistance which managed to topple the apartheid regime, which one never would have thought possible, and to have a transition, which was a very complicated transition, to democracy of that country. I find it very interesting to see how, in 1906, on September 11th again, there is this shining example of Gandhi, who decides to question what are pre-apartheid discriminatory practices. In other words, if you look at what was being applied to the Indian population, the migrant Indian population, right, in South Africa, it was basically a rehearsal for the apartheid regime and laws that were going to be put into place, where Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo and all the rest of the ANC were going to then confront that, in the sense of saying, the fundamental resistance—and I think Arun Gandhi says it well—but I would add to that, the fundamental resistance, the real weapon of resistance, are the bodies and the consciousness of human beings, day after day. Those are the ones. Now, you pay a big price for that. [no audio]
AMY GOODMAN : It looks like we just lost Ariel Dorfman, the bestselling author, playwright, poet and activist, who teaches at Duke University. We were speaking to him in a studio there in North Carolina.
And as we attempt to bring him back, Ben Jealous has been caught in rain, the president of the NAACP , as he tried to head to the Washington studios to speak about Troy Davis, but we&#8217;ll certainly talk about Troy Davis in the coming days. A death warrant has been issued for him. He&#8217;s on death row in Georgia.
We wanted to go back to another September 11th. It was September 11th, 1971. We&#8217;re going to turn now to an excerpt from the film Ghosts of Attica , a Lumiere production, which was made for Court TV. The story is told by Frank &quot;Big Black&quot; Smith, a prisoner who played a prominent role in the rebellion, who was tortured by troops, and Liz Fink, who served as the lead counsel for the former Attica prisoners. On September 9th, 1971, Attica prisoners rose up, Attica in upstate New York. On September 13th, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called out the state troopers. They opened fire, killing 39 men. This is an excerpt of Ghosts of Attica .
ATTICA PRISONER 1: I heard the helicopter, and the helicopter says, &quot;Lay down. Put your hands on your head. You will not be harmed.&quot; And I complied.
ATTICA PRISONER 2: They had us boxed in. And they was shooting down at us. I couldn&#8217;t crawl. I literally couldn&#8217;t crawl.
STATE TROOPER : I will repeat: Do not harm the hostages. Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed.
ATTICA PRISONER 2: I remember an inmate said, &quot;This guy is bleeding, is bleeding and bleeding.&quot; And I didn&#8217;t know that he was referring to me.
ELIZABETH FINK : Uh-huh, all right. Well, you&#8217;ve got to tell him that.
STATE TROOPER : Slowly retreat with your hands on top of your head as you move.
ATTICA PRISONER 3: Well, just, you know, everywhere you looked around, all you&#8217;re seeing was killing and shooting everything they came across.
FRANK &quot; BIG BLACK &quot; SMITH : People laying all over, and they&#8217;re all bleeding and bloody and stuff. You know, so everybody know now that it&#8217;s real, that this is it. You know, they&#8217;re here now. They&#8217;re in the yard now. They got control.
ELIZABETH FINK : State troopers just took their clubs and beat them down the stairs, broke people&#8217;s legs, hit them on the tibia and broke tibias. On their back, on their head, in their genitals, on their front, you know, wherever they could hit them, that&#8217;s where they beat them.
FRANK &quot; BIG BLACK &quot; SMITH : I&#8217;m telling you, my name is being called: &quot;Where is Big Black? Where is Big Black? Get up, Black! Get up!&quot; And he&#8217;s busting me with a [N-word] stick, pickaxe, and got a .38 in his hand. And I gets up. And he—bam! In my side, in my back. And made me run with my hand on my head over to the side. And before I got over there, two, three more correction officers with him now, and everybody&#8217;s hitting me. And now they made me spread eagle on the table. Here I am, laying down, looking up the catwalk. And cigarettes and spit and shells, after they shoot their gun, they&#8217;re dropping them down on me. And I&#8217;m there with the football up under my chin. &quot;That football better stay there, &#39;cause if it falls, you&#39;re going to die sooner than you expect to die.&quot; I&#8217;m not in charge now. You know, I&#8217;m back to their reality.
AMY GOODMAN : An excerpt of Ghosts of Attica , a Lumiere production, for Court TV, made by Brad Lichtenstein and David Van Taylor. AMYGOODMAN: Our guest at Duke University, in studio there, Ariel Dorfman, bestselling author, playwright, poet, survived September 11th, 1973, in Santiago, Chile, as we talk about other September 11ths, as well, in our continued series this week on this 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. We’re going to go back in time.

On September 11th this year, India marks the 105th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi launching the modern nonviolent resistance movement. Back on the centennial anniversary in 2006, we spoke with Gandhi’s grandson Arun about Satyagraha. I asked him to explain what exactly his grandfather, Mahatma Gandhi, did on September 11th, 1906.

ARUNGANDHI: He met in the theater with more than 3,000 Indian people, because they were victims of prejudices in South Africa and all kinds of unjust laws were enacted to oppress them and suppress them. And he realized that this was not right and that we should not submit to these things and should not live with this. And so he got the people together and explained to them that we have to resist this kind of injustice, and we have to do something about it. We should not just submit to it and live with it.

And people were wondering, how can we resist with the state so powerful, and we don’t have any weapons, you know, because every time, even today, when somebody talks about resistance, everybody thinks in terms of weapons and war and fighting. And that’s when grandfather explained to them that we don’t need any weapons of mass destruction. We have the ability to respond to this nonviolently and with self-suffering. And that’s what he encouraged the people to do.

JUANGONZALEZ: On September 11, 1990, renowned Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack was assassinated in Guatemala City. She had been stalked for two weeks prior to her death by a U.S.-backed military death squad. Myrna had been targeted in retaliation for her pioneering field work, which had begun to expose and document the destruction of rural indigenous communities in Guatemala. Guatemala’s U.S.-backed state forces and allied paramilitary groups were responsible for tens of thousands of human rights violations, including attacks against indigenous populations. Myrna’s sister Helen Mack has fought tirelessly to bring justice to people who were killed by high-ranking Guatemalan officials in the armed forces. In 2003, Democracy Now! spoke to Helen Mack in Guatemala City.

HELENMACK: Thirteen years ago, my sister was stabbed 27 times by the death squad from the Presidential High Command. And we’ve been trying to throw out the impunity, but on May 7th, the tribunal, even we had direct evidence of their responsibility, they were acquitted on May 7th of this year.

JUANGONZALEZ: We asked Helen Mack about General Rios Montt coming back to political prominence in Guatemala, even after the peace accords were signed. Here’s what she had to say.

HELENMACK: Well, it’s very terrible, because my sister was killed in the framework of the peace negotiations, and the army didn’t—never—never have accepted the peace agreements. And even the civilian government was wondering to humanize the conflict, the militaries didn’t. So she was killed in that framework. And now, they still don’t accept the peace agreements. Even her research and her studies were very useful for the resettlement agreement and other kind of agreements for the displaced people, they still rejected, and that’s why the peace agenda in Guatemala after eight years, it has been coming down.

AMYGOODMAN: Helen Mack, talking about her sister Myrna Mack, who died September 11th, 1990.

Then there was Steve Biko in South Africa. Steve Biko was being beaten to death in the back of a van, September 11th, 1977, by apartheid forces—unfortunately, U.S.-backed apartheid forces. He died in the early morning hours of September 12th, 1977.

And there was September 11th, 1993. In the midst of the U.S.-backed coup in Haiti, Antoine Izméry, a Haitian businessman who had thrown in his lot with Lavalas, was dragged out of a church by coup forces. He was murdered in broad daylight. He had been commemorating a massacre of parishioners at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church that had occurred five years before, on September 11th, 1988. At the time, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide narrowly escaped death in that attack. He later became president of Haiti.

In 2004, I spoke with Haitian President Aristide aboard the flight back from the Central African Republic, when he was the victim of yet another U.S.-backed coup. I asked him to describe what happened to him and his parish on that day, September 11th, 1988, at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church.

PRESIDENTJEAN-BERTRANDARISTIDE: We were praying. We were celebrating our faith in God. And for us, God means love, peace, justice, freedom, solidarity. Getting together to pray means empowering all those who share the same faith. If you stand up for justice, then you cannot close the eyes to not see poor people waiting to have jobs, to eat with dignity. Once you stand up for that, then you may have people not only rejecting you but also putting fire in a church, burning people. This is what happened that day, September 11, 1988.

When we had it elsewhere, not in a church, but in a country, like Chile and President Allende willing to stand up for human beings, for the rights to eat, the rights to go to school, the rights to have healthcare, and so and so, people who don’t care about human beings rejected that through coup d’état. When, on September 11, 2001, something tragical happened in the United States called terrorism, we saw the world rejecting terrorism, as if—when, for instance, we have Guy Philippe, Chamblain, well known as terrorists, drug dealers, convicted people, armed by those who pretend helping Haiti, to kill Haitians, it’s like if—it’s not anymore terrorism. So, racism somehow is linked to that cynical game.

AMYGOODMAN: That was former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide describing September 11, 1988, at the Saint-Jean Bosco Church. He survived that massacre. Five years later, Antoine Izméry was killed in the midst of a U.S.-backed coup in Haiti as he remembered that massacre. And I was speaking to President Aristide on his attempt to come back to Haiti more than seven years ago, when he was ousted in a coup, March of 2004. President Aristide has returned in the last months to Haiti after seven-and-a-half years in exile in South Africa.

Ariel Dorfman, you often remember these different September 11ths. Talk about their significance in understanding this 10th anniversary of another September 11th, of course, the one that the world does know about, September 11, 2001, when 3,000 people were killed in an instant in New York and in Washington in the September 11th attacks.

ARIELDORFMAN: Yes, I have several thoughts about this. The first is that we have September 11ths happening every day, everywhere. In other words, there are constantly acts of terror against the people, against the innocent people. And we have to understand that we need to get out of the September 11th sort of syndrome. And I’m using this as a metaphor, right? It turns out that that day is very significant, because it brings together these two events in Chile and the United States, which are similar—the Tuesdays, the bombs from the air, the terror, etc. But as Aristide just pointed out and as Helen Mack pointed out and as Arun Gandhi pointed out, there are other September 11ths, as well. So that’s the first thing I would say is, let’s remember that.

A second issue has to do with the—something that comes out of Chile is—and it’s something good that comes out of the terrible tragedy we had—is that, eventually, we arrested the—in fact, the British government, at the petition of the Spanish authorities, arrested General Pinochet in London in 1998 for crimes against humanity and torture. And it set an incredible precedent, which is that former heads of state—and, in fact, heads of state—can be judged anywhere in the world where humanity exists—in other words, anywhere—for crimes against humanity. It’s not crimes against the Chilean people. When Pinochet ordered torture, he was torturing one person, he was torturing the whole world. And those crimes do not prescribe.

The reason I’m mentioning this at this moment is because a few days ago on ABC, Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff of Colin Powell, said that one of the things that Cheney, Richard Cheney, Dick Cheney, was afraid of was of being "Pinocheted" — in other words, being made Pinochet. Now, I had never heard the word "Pinochet," which is a dread word for me, you know, a man who was responsible for so much death and suffering and destruction in my country, including my own life, I mean, which had been really exploded by him. That this man should not only become a noun, like saying, "We want a Pinochet," which people say when they say basically they want law and order and destroying the trade unions and breaking the social security network and privatizing the social security, when they say that. But I had never heard it made into a verb, in other words, to Pinochet somebody. Now, to Pinochet somebody is not to do a coup now; to Pinochet somebody, in the case of Dick Cheney, is to be put on trial for crimes against humanity, for war crimes, which, of course, both Cheney and Bush should be. I doubt that they will be, but he certainly should worry about going to Spain or going to France or going to England, because he might end up in jail, or in the possibility that that should happen to him. So he obviously is trying to not be Pinocheted. And I like the fact that Cheney is now scared of Pinochet, of the ghost of Pinochet, having brought in a world where Pinochet would be proud and where Pinochet was very, very happy. You know, in 2001, he said, "That proves how right we were," you know? So, that was one thing I just wanted to comment on.

And the last thing has to do with Gandhi. You know, I gave the Mandela lecture last year in South Africa and met up with the great hero and the great icon of our times, you know, Nelson Mandela. And it was wonderful to see how peaceful he was, even at 92 years old then, and how, though there was a military strategy on the part of the ANC, it was basically a nonviolent resistance which managed to topple the apartheid regime, which one never would have thought possible, and to have a transition, which was a very complicated transition, to democracy of that country. I find it very interesting to see how, in 1906, on September 11th again, there is this shining example of Gandhi, who decides to question what are pre-apartheid discriminatory practices. In other words, if you look at what was being applied to the Indian population, the migrant Indian population, right, in South Africa, it was basically a rehearsal for the apartheid regime and laws that were going to be put into place, where Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo and all the rest of the ANC were going to then confront that, in the sense of saying, the fundamental resistance—and I think Arun Gandhi says it well—but I would add to that, the fundamental resistance, the real weapon of resistance, are the bodies and the consciousness of human beings, day after day. Those are the ones. Now, you pay a big price for that. [no audio]

AMYGOODMAN: It looks like we just lost Ariel Dorfman, the bestselling author, playwright, poet and activist, who teaches at Duke University. We were speaking to him in a studio there in North Carolina.

And as we attempt to bring him back, Ben Jealous has been caught in rain, the president of the NAACP, as he tried to head to the Washington studios to speak about Troy Davis, but we’ll certainly talk about Troy Davis in the coming days. A death warrant has been issued for him. He’s on death row in Georgia.

We wanted to go back to another September 11th. It was September 11th, 1971. We’re going to turn now to an excerpt from the film Ghosts of Attica, a Lumiere production, which was made for Court TV. The story is told by Frank "Big Black" Smith, a prisoner who played a prominent role in the rebellion, who was tortured by troops, and Liz Fink, who served as the lead counsel for the former Attica prisoners. On September 9th, 1971, Attica prisoners rose up, Attica in upstate New York. On September 13th, then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller called out the state troopers. They opened fire, killing 39 men. This is an excerpt of Ghosts of Attica.

ATTICAPRISONER 1: I heard the helicopter, and the helicopter says, "Lay down. Put your hands on your head. You will not be harmed." And I complied.

ATTICAPRISONER 2: They had us boxed in. And they was shooting down at us. I couldn’t crawl. I literally couldn’t crawl.

STATETROOPER: I will repeat: Do not harm the hostages. Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed.

ATTICAPRISONER 2: I remember an inmate said, "This guy is bleeding, is bleeding and bleeding." And I didn’t know that he was referring to me.

ELIZABETHFINK: Uh-huh, all right. Well, you’ve got to tell him that.

STATETROOPER: Slowly retreat with your hands on top of your head as you move.

ATTICAPRISONER 3: Well, just, you know, everywhere you looked around, all you’re seeing was killing and shooting everything they came across.

FRANK "BIGBLACK" SMITH: People laying all over, and they’re all bleeding and bloody and stuff. You know, so everybody know now that it’s real, that this is it. You know, they’re here now. They’re in the yard now. They got control.

ELIZABETHFINK: State troopers just took their clubs and beat them down the stairs, broke people’s legs, hit them on the tibia and broke tibias. On their back, on their head, in their genitals, on their front, you know, wherever they could hit them, that’s where they beat them.

FRANK "BIGBLACK" SMITH: I’m telling you, my name is being called: "Where is Big Black? Where is Big Black? Get up, Black! Get up!" And he’s busting me with a [N-word] stick, pickaxe, and got a .38 in his hand. And I gets up. And he—bam! In my side, in my back. And made me run with my hand on my head over to the side. And before I got over there, two, three more correction officers with him now, and everybody’s hitting me. And now they made me spread eagle on the table. Here I am, laying down, looking up the catwalk. And cigarettes and spit and shells, after they shoot their gun, they’re dropping them down on me. And I’m there with the football up under my chin. "That football better stay there, 'cause if it falls, you're going to die sooner than you expect to die." I’m not in charge now. You know, I’m back to their reality.

AMYGOODMAN: An excerpt of Ghosts of Attica, a Lumiere production, for Court TV, made by Brad Lichtenstein and David Van Taylor.

]]>
Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400As Grim Details Emerge, Guatemalan Victims Seek Justice for U.S. Medical Experiments in 1940shttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/31/as_grim_details_emerge_guatemalan_victims
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-31:en/story/4e6af0 AMY GOODMAN : A White House bioethics commission has revealed gruesome new details about American-run venereal disease experiments on unsuspecting Guatemalans from 1946 to &#8217;48. The testing focused on sexually transmitted diseases and involved U.S. medical officials intentionally infecting Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients—without their permission—in order to study the effects of penicillin. The New York Times reports, quote, &quot;When some of the men failed to become infected through sex, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on the penises or faces, or even injected by spinal puncture.&quot;
President Obama personally apologized to Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom for the experiments last year, after they were discovered. Since then, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has studied 125,000 pages of documents and sent investigators to Guatemala.
On Tuesday, the commission concluded nearly 5,500 people were subjected to diagnostic testing in Guatemala, and more than 1,300 exposed to venereal disease by contact or inoculation. President Álvaro Colom has described the experiments as a &quot;crime against humanity&quot; and ordered his own investigation.
The Guatemala program was discovered by Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby while she was researching the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Professor Reverby spoke to Democracy Now! last year and described how much U.S. officials knew about the practices the program&#8217;s architect, Dr. John Cutler, was engaged in.
SUSAN REVERBY : It&#8217;s too easy to say, OK, this was a period when there wasn’t research norms or any of the kind of regulations we’ve had in place since the mid-&#39;70s. But Cutler&#39;s bosses at the Public Health Service knew this was sort of really on the edge. And the quote that I found that just really knocked me off the chair was one from the surgeon general himself, who said—and this is secondhand, but it was in a letter to Cutler, where one of his colleagues said, &quot;The surgeon general says, &#39;Well, we couldn&#39;t do this in the United States.&#8217;&quot; And that&#8217;s just a stunning, absolutely stunning, acknowledgment of what was going on.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby speaking last year on Democracy Now!
Members of the bioethics commission investigating the venereal disease experiments say they recalled Nazi experiments on Jews. They argue that Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, must have known from the Nuremberg doctors&#8217; trials, underway by 1946, that his work was unethical. Panel members endorsed the idea of creating a compensation fund for subjects who are harmed in the future, or requiring researchers to buy insurance for that purpose. Some countries require these steps; the United States does not.
For more, we go to Philadelphia. We&#8217;re joined by Dr. Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Talk about what you found and what you were most surprised by, Dr. Allen.
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Good morning. Thank you for having me.
We found many of the details of the experiments, which had not been uncovered by Dr. Susan Reverby, whom you briefly quoted a few minutes ago, and we also found some of the explanations for why this heinous research was able to continue for so long.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain the scope of these experiments. What exactly happened?
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Well, the original intent of the experiments was to determine whether or not there could be a prevention for the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis and chancroid. And this was the great question throughout the world. In a time of war, there&#8217;s a great concern about the extent to which sexually transmitted diseases can affect troops. And so, there was a great interest in finding a way to increase military readiness in the United States for our World War II efforts, but then, generally, to protect, as a public health matter, the population against unnecessary illness and even death caused by sexually transmitted diseases.
So, everyone agreed this was an important area of scientific, medical research to pursue, but there was only so much you could do. It was deemed ethically impossible in the United States to, for example, deliberately infect adults with a disease in order to treat them—or to not treat them, to track the course of the illness. But yet, the doctors involved, Dr. Cutler of the United States Public Health Service and his colleagues, decided that they could do this offshore and took the experimental protocol to Guatemala, where, as you noted, more than 6,000 people were involved in this research.
AMY GOODMAN : And again, explain just who Dr. John Cutler was. He was a U.S. government employee working for the National Health Service, right?
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Yes. So, at the time of the Guatemala experiments, which took place between 1944 and 1946, John Cutler was a 30-year-old scientist, researcher, who was employed by the United States Public Health Service. He was employed in their Venereal Disease Research Laboratory, which was headquartered in Staten Island, New York. And he and his colleagues had been working on STD research for many years. Cutler had been associated with Doctors Mahoney and Dr. Arnold in a U.S.-based project in a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they had attempted to infect 241 U.S. prisoners, with their consent, informed consent, in a similar research protocol. That research protocol failed miserably. They were unable to reliably create infection in U.S. prisoners. But they didn&#8217;t give up. They really wanted to try to see if they could infect human subjects and to then attempt to see whether various prophylaxis medications would work to prevent the contraction of the disease or work to cure the disease.
AMY GOODMAN : The current issue of Harper&#8217;s Magazine features excerpts of letters written by John Cutler, who oversaw the medical experiments in Guatemala—
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Yes, yes, yes.
AMY GOODMAN : —he was a surgeon, as you said, with the U.S. Public Health Service—
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : —to doctors at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. I want to read an excerpt of Culter&#8217;s letter dated January 7th, 1947. He writes, quote, &quot;So far as the work in the prison goes, to increase the number of exposures we shall bring in the source of infection along with some not infected so as to allay fears and suspicion. In that way, we shall be able to avoid political repercussions.&quot;
In another letter, Dr. Cutler characterizes his explanation of the experiments to the patients as, quote, &quot;double talk.&quot;
Cutler was later involved with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which monitored the progression of the disease in African-American men who believed they were receiving healthcare from the U.S government. This is a remarkable story here.
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Yes, what the commission uncovered was that Dr. Cutler and his colleagues knew that they would not be able to get informed consent, believed that in fact if you went to Guatemala, and you&#8217;re working with prostitutes, mental patients, prisoners, soldiers, people who are ill, you don&#8217;t have to get informed consent. And they didn&#8217;t even attempt to get the informed consent. Instead, they attempted to conceal the exact nature of their work with the research subjects. As a result of that, there were many reluctant participants or those who, for a pack of cigarettes or some other small amenity, were willing to undergo lumbar punctures, cisternal punctures to the base of the brain, or blood sticks. And this was not something which, again, could have ever been approved in the United States, It was absolutely outside the scope of what was legitimately considered ethical and humane conduct in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to bring our next guest into this discussion. She&#8217;s in Washington, D.C. Her name is Piper Hendricks. She&#8217;s an associate at Conrad &amp; Scherer law firm there. She&#8217;s helping to prepare a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of 700 Guatemalans who were unknowingly infected with syphilis from 1946 to 1948 as part of this American medical experiment. She&#8217;s collaborating with lawyers in Guatemala.
Talk about who you represent, Piper Hendricks.
PIPER HENDRICKS : Good morning, Amy. Thank you.
We represent an entire class of people who were impacted by the experiments. And that class includes everyone who was directly impacted—the soldiers, the mental patients, the prostitutes who were used, the orphans—and their family members. Something that&#8217;s important to remember here is that the treatment of the people who were impacted was not a top priority. Some people were left untreated completely. Those who received treatment may not have received enough to actually cure them of the disease with which they were infected. And so, they then passed that along to their spouses, to their children. And so, this is much bigger than just those who were involved in the experiments, which, as you&#8217;ve already mentioned, is a very large number, to begin with.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn for a minute to a clip of Dr. Cutler himself. This is a clip that comes from a documentary called Deadly Deception . It was done years ago by WGBH . Now, here, Dr. Cutler is talking about the Tuskegee experiments that he went on to do in the United States after leaving Guatemala.
DR. JOHN CUTLER : The Tuskegee study has been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented this way. And the fact was that it was concern for the black community, trying to set the stage for the best public health approach possible and best therapy, that led to the study being carried out. My regret is—in terms of the study, I have none, as a scientist, and say, one would like to have seen an ideal scientific study, but we’re dealing with human beings over a long period of time, and this is impossible.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Dr. Cutler. Before we go back to Piper Hendricks, Anita Allen, can you comment?
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Well, it&#8217;s a shame that, many years later, Dr. Cutler experienced no remorse. As you know, he left his research notes from Guatemala in an archive for the University of Pittsburgh in 1990. So, even in 1990, he did not understand, I think, that history would not forgive him or would not come to see that this scientifically unvalid research, which violated human rights, was not somehow worthwhile. So we have, again, a tragic example of someone who engaged in horrendous research in at least two contexts and felt no remorse about it.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to go to break, and then we&#8217;re going to come back to this discussion. Dr. Anita Allen is a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Piper Hendricks is with the law firm Conrad &amp; Scherer, representing Guatemalan families who were affected by the U.S. experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : In October of 2010, Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom called the experiments conducted by the U.S. government in Guatemala on hundreds of unsuspecting Guatemalans as a &quot;crime against humanity.&quot;
PRESIDENT ÁLVARO COLOM : [translated] It’s an incredible violation of human rights. But there it is. We must face it. We’re going to do whatever is necessary so that we can find out quickly the effect on people, because what we’re interested in is the victims. Obviously indignant. And if there were officials from the past who were involved in this, that also needs to be told.
AMY GOODMAN : That was the Guatemalan president. Piper Hendricks, can the Guatemalan government bring this case to an international court?
PIPER HENDRICKS : They could. We have not been working directly with the Guatemalan government. We&#8217;ve been filing—we filed our own case here in the United States. But given the crimes involved, that would be a possibility, were they—should they want to pursue it.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn right now to President Obama. In 2010, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said the Obama administration had apologized to the Guatemalan president, Álvaro Colom.
P.J. CROWLEY : Yesterday afternoon, Secretary Clinton called President Colom of Colombia sic to express both her shock at the discovery of the details of this research and also to apologize on behalf of the American people. During the course of the conversation, she also invited Guatemala to participate fully in the investigation that we will carry out to determine the facts behind this research.
AMY GOODMAN : Anita Allen, professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School, also serving on the U.S. bioethics commission that has just revealed even more of the gruesome details of these U.S. government tests on unsuspecting Guatemalans from 1946 to 1948, how will your commission, the bioethics commission, findings be used by the Obama administration? Will there be reparations recommended for the victims?
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Let me point out something that has not come out this morning so far. The Guatemalan government was completely on board with this research. The Guatemalan government and the U.S. government entered an agreement about the research. Guatemalan Doctor Juan Funes brought the idea of bringing research on STDs from the United States to Guatemala after he had spent a year working with Dr. Cutler and his colleagues in Staten Island. The health ministers of Guatemala approved the research. So that when we talk about liability and about responses, we need to look at all of the culpable parties, that include not just the United States and its doctors, but also the Guatemalan government and its physicians and researchers, who helped with the protocol and knew about the details of the protocol. So, while we may need to look, and we are going to be looking, very carefully at the question about U.S. responsibility and culpability as far as reparations or compensations is concerned, we have to look at those issues. We&#8217;re looking at the question not just in terms of U.S. liability and responsibility, but also Guatemalan liability for complicity with the horrible research protocol that affected its own people.
AMY GOODMAN : Piper Hendricks, your response?
PIPER HENDRICKS : I would agree with Professor Allen on that. I think something that&#8217;s very important to remember is, when we&#8217;re looking at the recommendations of the commission, it&#8217;s encouraging to think that, going forward, we will not make these mistakes again. However, it’s very important that the research team involved not depend entirely on the community. There are some recommendations that you be involved with the community, and I agree. However, in this example we have in Guatemala, as Professor Allen mentioned, the institutions were complicit in these experiments. They were not seeking consent of the people involved. Instead, you sought consent of the mental institution. And so, there were Guatemalan officials who were—whether they knew exactly what was going on is not clear, but it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s very disturbing, that—you know, there may be some very murky areas still in international law, but one thing that is absolutely without question is that non-consensual human medical experimentation is beyond the pale. And so, to have that going on in the time when we had Unit 731, when we had Nuremberg, there is just no doubt that what was going on was extremely problematic. And to seek the consent of the orphanages and of the institutions, rather than the people themselves, is, without a doubt, absolutely illegal.
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;m looking at a piece in the New York Times called &quot;Panel Hears Grim Details of Venereal Disease Tests,&quot; and it talks about the most offensive case, [per] a colleague of Anita Allen on the White House presidential commission, John Arras, a bioethicist of the University of Virginia and panelist, was that of a mental patient named Berta, he described. &quot;She was first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service, who led the experiments, described her as so unwell that she &#39;appeared she was going to die.&#39; Nonetheless, he inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died.&quot; I mean, these are gruesome details, Professor Allen. How—
DR. ANITA ALLEN : They really, really are.
AMY GOODMAN : So, at this point, what are the plans of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues? Now you have gone through the fact-finding phase.
DR. ANITA ALLEN : Thank you, yes. We intend to issue a report. It will probably be in the neighborhood of 180, 200 pages in September. This report will reveal all of our historical research that will describe the case of Berta and other similar patients who were affected and their situations. And then we&#8217;re going to also have a forward-looking study that will look very carefully at the question of what can we do to make sure this kind of thing doesn&#8217;t happen again.
We&#8217;re also—right now we&#8217;re surveying all the federally funded human subject research around the world, so we can understand how much of it&#8217;s going on. We&#8217;re looking at all the standards, the ethical standards in place, the government standards, the private standards. We&#8217;re looking comprehensively at what are the governing ethical norms today that will ensure that these kinds of things won&#8217;t happen again. All that&#8217;s happening.
I think, you know, one of the—for me, personally, one of the greatest tragedies of Guatemala was that the experiments happened at a time when Guatemala was experiencing a degree of freedom. It had been a country ruled by dictators for many, many, many years, since its independence from Spain in 1821. There was a great emphasis on labor unions, on free speech, political parties, and attempt to bring together the ethnic groups, the native, indigenous Guatemalan Indians and the Latinas. But this project sort of came at a time when concern about health, ironically, caused Guatemalan doctors to welcome U.S. researchers to try to help them with their STD problem, probably not realizing the full extent of what would be done, but being complicit to a tremendous degree in efforts to use vulnerable populations who could not give consent in controversial research that could not be done in the first world.
AMY GOODMAN : Piper Hendricks, the U.S. presence in Guatemala at that time was, to say the least, very controversial, as well.
PIPER HENDRICKS : Yes, it was. It was. And one thing that I&#8217;d like to note, Amy, is that as we&#8217;re waiting for the report, our case has been put on hold for a bit, waiting for the commission&#8217;s report to be released. And I think now that there&#8217;s no question that—and there never has been. I mean, there was the apology that you mentioned last October, with the U.S. admitting that there was culpability there. In the time since we filed our case in March, we&#8217;ve already had one of our victims pass away. I mean, this is something that happened many, many years ago, and people have been waiting for decades to see justice. So, we have a hearing this Friday in the case. I&#8217;m hoping that it can move forward, before we—the final report is released, because really time is of the essence to address the horrifying things that people went through back in the late 1940s.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Piper Hendricks, at Conrad &amp; Scherer law firm in Washington, helping prepare a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of hundreds of Guatemalans, over 700, unknowingly infected with syphilis from &#8217;46 to 1948 in this American medical experiment. And I also want to thank Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. We will speak again as this case and others are investigated. AMYGOODMAN: A White House bioethics commission has revealed gruesome new details about American-run venereal disease experiments on unsuspecting Guatemalans from 1946 to ’48. The testing focused on sexually transmitted diseases and involved U.S. medical officials intentionally infecting Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, mental patients—without their permission—in order to study the effects of penicillin. The New York Times reports, quote, "When some of the men failed to become infected through sex, the bacteria were poured into scrapes made on the penises or faces, or even injected by spinal puncture."

President Obama personally apologized to Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom for the experiments last year, after they were discovered. Since then, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has studied 125,000 pages of documents and sent investigators to Guatemala.

On Tuesday, the commission concluded nearly 5,500 people were subjected to diagnostic testing in Guatemala, and more than 1,300 exposed to venereal disease by contact or inoculation. President Álvaro Colom has described the experiments as a "crime against humanity" and ordered his own investigation.

The Guatemala program was discovered by Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby while she was researching the infamous Tuskegee experiments. Professor Reverby spoke to Democracy Now! last year and described how much U.S. officials knew about the practices the program’s architect, Dr. John Cutler, was engaged in.

SUSANREVERBY: It’s too easy to say, OK, this was a period when there wasn’t research norms or any of the kind of regulations we’ve had in place since the mid-'70s. But Cutler's bosses at the Public Health Service knew this was sort of really on the edge. And the quote that I found that just really knocked me off the chair was one from the surgeon general himself, who said—and this is secondhand, but it was in a letter to Cutler, where one of his colleagues said, "The surgeon general says, 'Well, we couldn't do this in the United States.’" And that’s just a stunning, absolutely stunning, acknowledgment of what was going on.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby speaking last year on Democracy Now!

Members of the bioethics commission investigating the venereal disease experiments say they recalled Nazi experiments on Jews. They argue that Dr. Cutler, who died in 2003, must have known from the Nuremberg doctors’ trials, underway by 1946, that his work was unethical. Panel members endorsed the idea of creating a compensation fund for subjects who are harmed in the future, or requiring researchers to buy insurance for that purpose. Some countries require these steps; the United States does not.

For more, we go to Philadelphia. We’re joined by Dr. Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Talk about what you found and what you were most surprised by, Dr. Allen.

DR. ANITAALLEN: Good morning. Thank you for having me.

We found many of the details of the experiments, which had not been uncovered by Dr. Susan Reverby, whom you briefly quoted a few minutes ago, and we also found some of the explanations for why this heinous research was able to continue for so long.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain the scope of these experiments. What exactly happened?

DR. ANITAALLEN: Well, the original intent of the experiments was to determine whether or not there could be a prevention for the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea, syphilis and chancroid. And this was the great question throughout the world. In a time of war, there’s a great concern about the extent to which sexually transmitted diseases can affect troops. And so, there was a great interest in finding a way to increase military readiness in the United States for our World War II efforts, but then, generally, to protect, as a public health matter, the population against unnecessary illness and even death caused by sexually transmitted diseases.

So, everyone agreed this was an important area of scientific, medical research to pursue, but there was only so much you could do. It was deemed ethically impossible in the United States to, for example, deliberately infect adults with a disease in order to treat them—or to not treat them, to track the course of the illness. But yet, the doctors involved, Dr. Cutler of the United States Public Health Service and his colleagues, decided that they could do this offshore and took the experimental protocol to Guatemala, where, as you noted, more than 6,000 people were involved in this research.

AMYGOODMAN: And again, explain just who Dr. John Cutler was. He was a U.S. government employee working for the National Health Service, right?

DR. ANITAALLEN: Yes. So, at the time of the Guatemala experiments, which took place between 1944 and 1946, John Cutler was a 30-year-old scientist, researcher, who was employed by the United States Public Health Service. He was employed in their Venereal Disease Research Laboratory, which was headquartered in Staten Island, New York. And he and his colleagues had been working on STD research for many years. Cutler had been associated with Doctors Mahoney and Dr. Arnold in a U.S.-based project in a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they had attempted to infect 241 U.S. prisoners, with their consent, informed consent, in a similar research protocol. That research protocol failed miserably. They were unable to reliably create infection in U.S. prisoners. But they didn’t give up. They really wanted to try to see if they could infect human subjects and to then attempt to see whether various prophylaxis medications would work to prevent the contraction of the disease or work to cure the disease.

AMYGOODMAN: The current issue of Harper’s Magazine features excerpts of letters written by John Cutler, who oversaw the medical experiments in Guatemala—

DR. ANITAALLEN: Yes, yes, yes.

AMYGOODMAN: —he was a surgeon, as you said, with the U.S. Public Health Service—

DR. ANITAALLEN: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: —to doctors at the Marine Hospital on Staten Island, New York. I want to read an excerpt of Culter’s letter dated January 7th, 1947. He writes, quote, "So far as the work in the prison goes, to increase the number of exposures we shall bring in the source of infection along with some not infected so as to allay fears and suspicion. In that way, we shall be able to avoid political repercussions."

In another letter, Dr. Cutler characterizes his explanation of the experiments to the patients as, quote, "double talk."

Cutler was later involved with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which monitored the progression of the disease in African-American men who believed they were receiving healthcare from the U.S government. This is a remarkable story here.

DR. ANITAALLEN: Yes, what the commission uncovered was that Dr. Cutler and his colleagues knew that they would not be able to get informed consent, believed that in fact if you went to Guatemala, and you’re working with prostitutes, mental patients, prisoners, soldiers, people who are ill, you don’t have to get informed consent. And they didn’t even attempt to get the informed consent. Instead, they attempted to conceal the exact nature of their work with the research subjects. As a result of that, there were many reluctant participants or those who, for a pack of cigarettes or some other small amenity, were willing to undergo lumbar punctures, cisternal punctures to the base of the brain, or blood sticks. And this was not something which, again, could have ever been approved in the United States, It was absolutely outside the scope of what was legitimately considered ethical and humane conduct in the United States.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to bring our next guest into this discussion. She’s in Washington, D.C. Her name is Piper Hendricks. She’s an associate at Conrad & Scherer law firm there. She’s helping to prepare a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of 700 Guatemalans who were unknowingly infected with syphilis from 1946 to 1948 as part of this American medical experiment. She’s collaborating with lawyers in Guatemala.

Talk about who you represent, Piper Hendricks.

PIPERHENDRICKS: Good morning, Amy. Thank you.

We represent an entire class of people who were impacted by the experiments. And that class includes everyone who was directly impacted—the soldiers, the mental patients, the prostitutes who were used, the orphans—and their family members. Something that’s important to remember here is that the treatment of the people who were impacted was not a top priority. Some people were left untreated completely. Those who received treatment may not have received enough to actually cure them of the disease with which they were infected. And so, they then passed that along to their spouses, to their children. And so, this is much bigger than just those who were involved in the experiments, which, as you’ve already mentioned, is a very large number, to begin with.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn for a minute to a clip of Dr. Cutler himself. This is a clip that comes from a documentary called Deadly Deception. It was done years ago by WGBH. Now, here, Dr. Cutler is talking about the Tuskegee experiments that he went on to do in the United States after leaving Guatemala.

DR. JOHNCUTLER: The Tuskegee study has been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented this way. And the fact was that it was concern for the black community, trying to set the stage for the best public health approach possible and best therapy, that led to the study being carried out. My regret is—in terms of the study, I have none, as a scientist, and say, one would like to have seen an ideal scientific study, but we’re dealing with human beings over a long period of time, and this is impossible.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Dr. Cutler. Before we go back to Piper Hendricks, Anita Allen, can you comment?

DR. ANITAALLEN: Well, it’s a shame that, many years later, Dr. Cutler experienced no remorse. As you know, he left his research notes from Guatemala in an archive for the University of Pittsburgh in 1990. So, even in 1990, he did not understand, I think, that history would not forgive him or would not come to see that this scientifically unvalid research, which violated human rights, was not somehow worthwhile. So we have, again, a tragic example of someone who engaged in horrendous research in at least two contexts and felt no remorse about it.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, and then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Dr. Anita Allen is a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Piper Hendricks is with the law firm Conrad & Scherer, representing Guatemalan families who were affected by the U.S. experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: In October of 2010, Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom called the experiments conducted by the U.S. government in Guatemala on hundreds of unsuspecting Guatemalans as a "crime against humanity."

PRESIDENT ÁLVARO COLOM: [translated] It’s an incredible violation of human rights. But there it is. We must face it. We’re going to do whatever is necessary so that we can find out quickly the effect on people, because what we’re interested in is the victims. Obviously indignant. And if there were officials from the past who were involved in this, that also needs to be told.

AMYGOODMAN: That was the Guatemalan president. Piper Hendricks, can the Guatemalan government bring this case to an international court?

PIPERHENDRICKS: They could. We have not been working directly with the Guatemalan government. We’ve been filing—we filed our own case here in the United States. But given the crimes involved, that would be a possibility, were they—should they want to pursue it.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn right now to President Obama. In 2010, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said the Obama administration had apologized to the Guatemalan president, Álvaro Colom.

P.J. CROWLEY: Yesterday afternoon, Secretary Clinton called President Colom of Colombia sic to express both her shock at the discovery of the details of this research and also to apologize on behalf of the American people. During the course of the conversation, she also invited Guatemala to participate fully in the investigation that we will carry out to determine the facts behind this research.

AMYGOODMAN: Anita Allen, professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School, also serving on the U.S. bioethics commission that has just revealed even more of the gruesome details of these U.S. government tests on unsuspecting Guatemalans from 1946 to 1948, how will your commission, the bioethics commission, findings be used by the Obama administration? Will there be reparations recommended for the victims?

DR. ANITAALLEN: Let me point out something that has not come out this morning so far. The Guatemalan government was completely on board with this research. The Guatemalan government and the U.S. government entered an agreement about the research. Guatemalan Doctor Juan Funes brought the idea of bringing research on STDs from the United States to Guatemala after he had spent a year working with Dr. Cutler and his colleagues in Staten Island. The health ministers of Guatemala approved the research. So that when we talk about liability and about responses, we need to look at all of the culpable parties, that include not just the United States and its doctors, but also the Guatemalan government and its physicians and researchers, who helped with the protocol and knew about the details of the protocol. So, while we may need to look, and we are going to be looking, very carefully at the question about U.S. responsibility and culpability as far as reparations or compensations is concerned, we have to look at those issues. We’re looking at the question not just in terms of U.S. liability and responsibility, but also Guatemalan liability for complicity with the horrible research protocol that affected its own people.

AMYGOODMAN: Piper Hendricks, your response?

PIPERHENDRICKS: I would agree with Professor Allen on that. I think something that’s very important to remember is, when we’re looking at the recommendations of the commission, it’s encouraging to think that, going forward, we will not make these mistakes again. However, it’s very important that the research team involved not depend entirely on the community. There are some recommendations that you be involved with the community, and I agree. However, in this example we have in Guatemala, as Professor Allen mentioned, the institutions were complicit in these experiments. They were not seeking consent of the people involved. Instead, you sought consent of the mental institution. And so, there were Guatemalan officials who were—whether they knew exactly what was going on is not clear, but it’s something that’s very disturbing, that—you know, there may be some very murky areas still in international law, but one thing that is absolutely without question is that non-consensual human medical experimentation is beyond the pale. And so, to have that going on in the time when we had Unit 731, when we had Nuremberg, there is just no doubt that what was going on was extremely problematic. And to seek the consent of the orphanages and of the institutions, rather than the people themselves, is, without a doubt, absolutely illegal.

AMYGOODMAN: I’m looking at a piece in the New York Times called "Panel Hears Grim Details of Venereal Disease Tests," and it talks about the most offensive case, [per] a colleague of Anita Allen on the White House presidential commission, John Arras, a bioethicist of the University of Virginia and panelist, was that of a mental patient named Berta, he described. "She was first deliberately infected with syphilis and, months later, given penicillin. After that, Dr. John C. Cutler of the Public Health Service, who led the experiments, described her as so unwell that she 'appeared she was going to die.' Nonetheless, he inserted pus from a male gonorrhea victim into her eyes, urethra and rectum. Four days later, infected in both eyes and bleeding from the urethra, she died." I mean, these are gruesome details, Professor Allen. How—

DR. ANITAALLEN: They really, really are.

AMYGOODMAN: So, at this point, what are the plans of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues? Now you have gone through the fact-finding phase.

DR. ANITAALLEN: Thank you, yes. We intend to issue a report. It will probably be in the neighborhood of 180, 200 pages in September. This report will reveal all of our historical research that will describe the case of Berta and other similar patients who were affected and their situations. And then we’re going to also have a forward-looking study that will look very carefully at the question of what can we do to make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.

We’re also—right now we’re surveying all the federally funded human subject research around the world, so we can understand how much of it’s going on. We’re looking at all the standards, the ethical standards in place, the government standards, the private standards. We’re looking comprehensively at what are the governing ethical norms today that will ensure that these kinds of things won’t happen again. All that’s happening.

I think, you know, one of the—for me, personally, one of the greatest tragedies of Guatemala was that the experiments happened at a time when Guatemala was experiencing a degree of freedom. It had been a country ruled by dictators for many, many, many years, since its independence from Spain in 1821. There was a great emphasis on labor unions, on free speech, political parties, and attempt to bring together the ethnic groups, the native, indigenous Guatemalan Indians and the Latinas. But this project sort of came at a time when concern about health, ironically, caused Guatemalan doctors to welcome U.S. researchers to try to help them with their STD problem, probably not realizing the full extent of what would be done, but being complicit to a tremendous degree in efforts to use vulnerable populations who could not give consent in controversial research that could not be done in the first world.

AMYGOODMAN: Piper Hendricks, the U.S. presence in Guatemala at that time was, to say the least, very controversial, as well.

PIPERHENDRICKS: Yes, it was. It was. And one thing that I’d like to note, Amy, is that as we’re waiting for the report, our case has been put on hold for a bit, waiting for the commission’s report to be released. And I think now that there’s no question that—and there never has been. I mean, there was the apology that you mentioned last October, with the U.S. admitting that there was culpability there. In the time since we filed our case in March, we’ve already had one of our victims pass away. I mean, this is something that happened many, many years ago, and people have been waiting for decades to see justice. So, we have a hearing this Friday in the case. I’m hoping that it can move forward, before we—the final report is released, because really time is of the essence to address the horrifying things that people went through back in the late 1940s.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Piper Hendricks, at Conrad & Scherer law firm in Washington, helping prepare a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government on behalf of hundreds of Guatemalans, over 700, unknowingly infected with syphilis from ’46 to 1948 in this American medical experiment. And I also want to thank Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. We will speak again as this case and others are investigated.

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Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400Guatemalan Soldiers Sentenced to 6,060 Years in Prison for Role in 1982 Massacrehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/4/guatemalan_soldiers_sentenced_to_6_060
tag:democracynow.org,2011-08-04:en/story/592f52 AMY GOODMAN : On Tuesday, a national court in Guatemala handed down the first convictions for a notorious massacre. It was 1982 when Guatemalan soldiers attacked the village of Las Dos Erres and killed more than 200 people—many of them women, children and the elderly—who were assaulted and beaten before they were shot or bludgeoned to death and then thrown down a well.
Now a Guatemalan judge has sentenced four of the soldiers who carried out the Dos Erres attack to 6,060 years of prison each. That&#8217;s 30 years per person they killed. The court also found the soldiers guilty of crimes against human rights, adding another 30 years to their sentences.
After the sentencing, a relative of one of the victims celebrated the landmark verdict.
SILVIA ESCOBAR : [translated] We all feel happy. Everyone from Dos Erres feels happy because we got what we wanted, so there will be justice for these people who did not have compassion for all those people—children, elderly, innocent people, hard-working—who they killed.
AMY GOODMAN : In related news, another soldier suspected of involvement in the Las Dos Erres massacre, Pedro Pimentel Rios, was deported from the United States earlier this month and could face similar charges. It&#8217;s the latest step in a process to end impunity for those involved in the deaths or disappearances of at least 200,000 people during the time of Guatemala&#8217;s military and paramilitaries that were killing the people.
For more, we&#8217;re joined now from Washington, D.C., by Annie Bird, co-director of Rights Action, worked extensively with civilian survivors in Guatemala, including one in this case. And we go to Guatemala City, where Ramón Cadena joins us on the phone. He was the ad hoc judge who heard the Las Dos Erres massacre case for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. As director of the International Commission of Jurists, he also helped oversee the selection of the new attorney general in Guatemala who allowed this case, and other pending cases, to move forward.
I would like to start in Guatemala and go to Ramón Cadena. Explain what happened in 1982 in Guatemala.
RAMÓN CADENA : Yes, thank you. Good morning.
What happened in Guatemala is, first of all, in the context of war during the &#39;80s, and the military doctrine of security considered all the civilians and all those who opposed to the military regime as communists and as enemies of the army. So, there was a settlement called the Dos Erres, because it had the first letter of the two founders of the settlement. They begin with an &quot;R,&quot; so that is why that it&#39;s named it.
AMY GOODMAN : Ramón Cadena, we&#8217;re going to try to—we&#8217;re going to try to clear up your phone line. So we&#8217;re going to go to Annie Bird for now to pick up where Ramón Cadena left off. It&#8217;s just a bad phone line to Guatemala City. Annie Bird, talking about Dos Erres in 1982, even where it is in Guatemala.
ANNIE BIRD : Yes. Dos Erres is a town in the northern department of the Petén, a jungle region. The people in the region in that time were settling in the jungle in really hard conditions, working really hard to clear the forest, plant fields. And the army came through in a series of massacres, so it was part of—that were part of a campaign of genocide between 1981 and 1982 in which they massacred over 660 villages of civilian populations. In the case of Dos Erres, the massacre took place in December 1982 during the—when Efraín Ríos Montt was the military dictator. And he is actually part of—there&#8217;s a genocide case also being taken against him nationally and his highest-ranking military officers. And earlier this year in June, one of the highest-ranking military officers, General López, was arrested and charged with the crime of genocide, which is historic. And so, he would have been a higher-up commanding officer that coordinated the campaign that the massacre of Dos Erres was a part of. The massacre in Dos Erres took place over three days. Over 250 men, women and children were massacred in the most brutal of ways. They were—most of the women were raped before they were killed.
And, you know, the survivors have been on a long, long search for justice. The case was first presented to the courts in 1994. Arrest warrants were issued in 1999. And a case was taken—you know, because the arrest warrants were never acted upon, it was taken before the Inter-American Commission. The Inter-American Court ruled that the state was violating human rights in the case and not providing justice. And then, finally, this year, some of the material perpetrators, and now even also one of the high-up intellectual authors, are being arrested. It&#8217;s very important for Guatemala also because it&#8217;s part of a series of cases that are advancing through the justice system today for the crimes of the past, of the 1980s, of the genocide in which more than 200,000, mostly Mayan, people were killed by the Guatemalan army, with strong support from the United States in training and funding.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the issue—let&#8217;s talk about that issue of the United States. Annie Bird, human rights groups, including yours, Rights Watch, allege that General Otto Pérez Molina, now a leading presidential candidate in Guatemala, was directly involved in the systematic use of torture and acts of genocide during these years. For our television and online viewers, we want to warn you we&#8217;re playing graphic footage taken while Molina was in command of the Ixil Triangle in 1982, where there was a village massacre campaign. The video shows then-Major Pérez Molina being interviewed by journalist Allan Nairn, while the battered bodies of several prisoners lie nearby on the ground. Although Pérez Molina was using a different name, he seems identifiable by his voice and by his features. Annie Bird, can you talk about this?
ANNIE BIRD : Yes. Pérez Molina is the leading presidential candidate for the elections scheduled to be held September 11th. Very little is known in Guatemala about his past in the army. There&#8217;s been very little discussion in the press. Of course, he runs as a general, as a former general, and is known to have been, of course, in the war. But the reality is that he is very well known in the Ixil area, very much identified by people there as having been a commanding officer in the region. In Quiché, in that area, almost half of the massacres during the genocide occurred in that area, over 300 massacres.
And in the video footage, this man, that identified himself as Tito Arias, but that&#8217;s known to be the nom de guerre of Otto Pérez Molina, is seen over the dead bodies of four prisoners, that the soldiers under his command told the journalists that they had captured alive and brought in and were interrogated and killed, which was standard practice. There were virtually no—there were no official prisoners of war during the war in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN : And the role of the United States at this time—this was during the years of President Reagan—in supporting the Guatemalan military and training the G2, those that were killing the civilians?
ANNIE BIRD : Right. There was strong, you know, really unquestioned support of the Guatemalan military by the United States, consistently, you know, since the military—since the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 and through the series of military dictators that ruled the country, you know, since then and throughout the war, that enjoyed strong backing of the United States.
And actually, you know, and President Bill Clinton, when he visited Guatemala when he was president, apologized for the U.S. role in supporting the military during the genocide in Guatemala, which we find actually very concerning, given that Hillary Clinton again visited Guatemala—she had been along on that trip earlier this year in June—and a situation—and in support of the CARSI initiative and a big growth of U.S. investment in security initiatives in the region and military—support of the military and the police at a time when there&#8217;s growing abuses, particularly in Honduras. And during her trip to Guatemala, she promised $40 million in security assistance to Honduras, in a government implicated in gross human rights violations. So it&#8217;s concerning that the U.S. policy in Central America doesn&#8217;t seem to be changing.
AMY GOODMAN : Let me try Ramón Cadena again in Guatemala City. We&#8217;ll see if your phone line is improved. If Molina were to become the president—we this man who was standing over the dead bodies back in the early 1980s—what would it mean for these trials?
RAMÓN CADENA : Well, I think that, definitely, if he gets into the executive branch as president, he will, and also other ministers will, be blocking or trying to block some of the cases. As a matter of fact, right now there is a case, the Bámaca case. It&#8217;s a guerrilla man that was detained and then disappeared and probably killed. And everything comes out as Molina—as Pérez Molina as one of the executors. And the case has been blocked by the constitutional court right now, because there is a ruling of the—of the—
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re talking about the death of Bámaca—of Bámaca, who was the husband of the American lawyer, Jennifer Harbury.
RAMÓN CADENA : Yes, exactly, exactly. She has been fighting for this case against the impunity, but it has been impossible. And the constitutional court is right now blocking this case. So I think if he gets into power, definitely the case is going to be affected. And we have heard that he wants to change the attorney general that is right now appointed, so it will be very negative for justice.
AMY GOODMAN : And, Ramón Cadena, these are trials of soldiers, and they are getting many years in prison, thousands of years in prison. What about the United States?
RAMÓN CADENA : Just I want to explain that the judges, first of all, they said that they wanted to give all of these years for each person that was killed, but the years that they will be legally in jail are 50 years. So this is just a symbolic ruling.
Now, yes, the United States, I think there should be an investigation regarding the involvement of the United States in these enormous massacres. And we hope that once the case of genocide advances, there will be a possibility of pointing out that other actors, such as the case of the United States, who was involved, deeply involved in this case.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go to one last clip, and this was of a soldier. After the four soldiers were sentenced Tuesday, one of the convicted officers said he felt no regret for what he had done.
CARLOS CARIAS : [translated] I don&#8217;t regret anything, because due to the noble institution I belong to, and continue to belong to, because it&#8217;s in my veins. The Guatemalan army, I don&#8217;t mind taking the blame for you. I don&#8217;t care, because I know there will always be a soldier at the four cardinal points looking after Guatemalans, as I did myself. All my colleagues who have died during the war, who were there to defend Guatemala, so that Guatemala is what it is now, I think if this is the payment I need to make, I accept it kindly.
AMY GOODMAN : He is making an important point here, Annie Bird. He says he was part of the Guatemalan army, and he did it for that. In fact, that is true, isn&#8217;t that right?
ANNIE BIRD : That is exactly true. And he also made another good point, in that he played an important role, and the Guatemalan army played an important role, in making Guatemala what it is today. And Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The levels of violence have increased. They&#8217;re at higher levels of violence than—of killing than during many of the years of the armed conflict. And that&#8217;s, you know, because of organized crime, drug trafficking, the war against drug. And the fact of the matter is that many of the military networks during the war were involved in organized crime activities, as death squads, as—you know, involved in drug-trafficking and car-thieving networks and whatnot. And those networks continue to operate today in Guatemala, and they place people within the justice system. You know, these networks control courts, control sections of the attorney general&#8217;s office. And so, people in Guatemala have been in a really difficult struggle over, you know, 25—over 20 years to try to bring the Guatemalan justice system to a point where it can undertake these trials, because the networks of organized crime that have influence within the justice system use that influence to illegally block justice. And so, last year, for example, there was—
AMY GOODMAN : We have five seconds.
ANNIE BIRD : —an attorney general named, with strong ties to organized crime, and after six months of really important struggle, they finally had a very good attorney general named, who has moved on cases like these. And those are important advances and are necessary not just for trying crimes of the past, but for ending the violence that today Guatemalans suffer.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to thank you both for being with us, Annie Bird, co-director of Rights Action, and Ramón Cadena, joining us from Guatemala City in Guatemala, the ad hoc judge who heard the Las Dos Erres massacre case for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. AMYGOODMAN: On Tuesday, a national court in Guatemala handed down the first convictions for a notorious massacre. It was 1982 when Guatemalan soldiers attacked the village of Las Dos Erres and killed more than 200 people—many of them women, children and the elderly—who were assaulted and beaten before they were shot or bludgeoned to death and then thrown down a well.

Now a Guatemalan judge has sentenced four of the soldiers who carried out the Dos Erres attack to 6,060 years of prison each. That’s 30 years per person they killed. The court also found the soldiers guilty of crimes against human rights, adding another 30 years to their sentences.

After the sentencing, a relative of one of the victims celebrated the landmark verdict.

SILVIAESCOBAR: [translated] We all feel happy. Everyone from Dos Erres feels happy because we got what we wanted, so there will be justice for these people who did not have compassion for all those people—children, elderly, innocent people, hard-working—who they killed.

AMYGOODMAN: In related news, another soldier suspected of involvement in the Las Dos Erres massacre, Pedro Pimentel Rios, was deported from the United States earlier this month and could face similar charges. It’s the latest step in a process to end impunity for those involved in the deaths or disappearances of at least 200,000 people during the time of Guatemala’s military and paramilitaries that were killing the people.

For more, we’re joined now from Washington, D.C., by Annie Bird, co-director of Rights Action, worked extensively with civilian survivors in Guatemala, including one in this case. And we go to Guatemala City, where Ramón Cadena joins us on the phone. He was the ad hoc judge who heard the Las Dos Erres massacre case for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. As director of the International Commission of Jurists, he also helped oversee the selection of the new attorney general in Guatemala who allowed this case, and other pending cases, to move forward.

I would like to start in Guatemala and go to Ramón Cadena. Explain what happened in 1982 in Guatemala.

RAMÓN CADENA: Yes, thank you. Good morning.

What happened in Guatemala is, first of all, in the context of war during the '80s, and the military doctrine of security considered all the civilians and all those who opposed to the military regime as communists and as enemies of the army. So, there was a settlement called the Dos Erres, because it had the first letter of the two founders of the settlement. They begin with an "R," so that is why that it's named it.

AMYGOODMAN: Ramón Cadena, we’re going to try to—we’re going to try to clear up your phone line. So we’re going to go to Annie Bird for now to pick up where Ramón Cadena left off. It’s just a bad phone line to Guatemala City. Annie Bird, talking about Dos Erres in 1982, even where it is in Guatemala.

ANNIEBIRD: Yes. Dos Erres is a town in the northern department of the Petén, a jungle region. The people in the region in that time were settling in the jungle in really hard conditions, working really hard to clear the forest, plant fields. And the army came through in a series of massacres, so it was part of—that were part of a campaign of genocide between 1981 and 1982 in which they massacred over 660 villages of civilian populations. In the case of Dos Erres, the massacre took place in December 1982 during the—when Efraín Ríos Montt was the military dictator. And he is actually part of—there’s a genocide case also being taken against him nationally and his highest-ranking military officers. And earlier this year in June, one of the highest-ranking military officers, General López, was arrested and charged with the crime of genocide, which is historic. And so, he would have been a higher-up commanding officer that coordinated the campaign that the massacre of Dos Erres was a part of. The massacre in Dos Erres took place over three days. Over 250 men, women and children were massacred in the most brutal of ways. They were—most of the women were raped before they were killed.

And, you know, the survivors have been on a long, long search for justice. The case was first presented to the courts in 1994. Arrest warrants were issued in 1999. And a case was taken—you know, because the arrest warrants were never acted upon, it was taken before the Inter-American Commission. The Inter-American Court ruled that the state was violating human rights in the case and not providing justice. And then, finally, this year, some of the material perpetrators, and now even also one of the high-up intellectual authors, are being arrested. It’s very important for Guatemala also because it’s part of a series of cases that are advancing through the justice system today for the crimes of the past, of the 1980s, of the genocide in which more than 200,000, mostly Mayan, people were killed by the Guatemalan army, with strong support from the United States in training and funding.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the issue—let’s talk about that issue of the United States. Annie Bird, human rights groups, including yours, Rights Watch, allege that General Otto Pérez Molina, now a leading presidential candidate in Guatemala, was directly involved in the systematic use of torture and acts of genocide during these years. For our television and online viewers, we want to warn you we’re playing graphic footage taken while Molina was in command of the Ixil Triangle in 1982, where there was a village massacre campaign. The video shows then-Major Pérez Molina being interviewed by journalist Allan Nairn, while the battered bodies of several prisoners lie nearby on the ground. Although Pérez Molina was using a different name, he seems identifiable by his voice and by his features. Annie Bird, can you talk about this?

ANNIEBIRD: Yes. Pérez Molina is the leading presidential candidate for the elections scheduled to be held September 11th. Very little is known in Guatemala about his past in the army. There’s been very little discussion in the press. Of course, he runs as a general, as a former general, and is known to have been, of course, in the war. But the reality is that he is very well known in the Ixil area, very much identified by people there as having been a commanding officer in the region. In Quiché, in that area, almost half of the massacres during the genocide occurred in that area, over 300 massacres.

And in the video footage, this man, that identified himself as Tito Arias, but that’s known to be the nom de guerre of Otto Pérez Molina, is seen over the dead bodies of four prisoners, that the soldiers under his command told the journalists that they had captured alive and brought in and were interrogated and killed, which was standard practice. There were virtually no—there were no official prisoners of war during the war in Guatemala.

AMYGOODMAN: And the role of the United States at this time—this was during the years of President Reagan—in supporting the Guatemalan military and training the G2, those that were killing the civilians?

ANNIEBIRD: Right. There was strong, you know, really unquestioned support of the Guatemalan military by the United States, consistently, you know, since the military—since the U.S.-backed coup in 1954 and through the series of military dictators that ruled the country, you know, since then and throughout the war, that enjoyed strong backing of the United States.

And actually, you know, and President Bill Clinton, when he visited Guatemala when he was president, apologized for the U.S. role in supporting the military during the genocide in Guatemala, which we find actually very concerning, given that Hillary Clinton again visited Guatemala—she had been along on that trip earlier this year in June—and a situation—and in support of the CARSI initiative and a big growth of U.S. investment in security initiatives in the region and military—support of the military and the police at a time when there’s growing abuses, particularly in Honduras. And during her trip to Guatemala, she promised $40 million in security assistance to Honduras, in a government implicated in gross human rights violations. So it’s concerning that the U.S. policy in Central America doesn’t seem to be changing.

AMYGOODMAN: Let me try Ramón Cadena again in Guatemala City. We’ll see if your phone line is improved. If Molina were to become the president—we this man who was standing over the dead bodies back in the early 1980s—what would it mean for these trials?

RAMÓN CADENA: Well, I think that, definitely, if he gets into the executive branch as president, he will, and also other ministers will, be blocking or trying to block some of the cases. As a matter of fact, right now there is a case, the Bámaca case. It’s a guerrilla man that was detained and then disappeared and probably killed. And everything comes out as Molina—as Pérez Molina as one of the executors. And the case has been blocked by the constitutional court right now, because there is a ruling of the—of the—

AMYGOODMAN: You’re talking about the death of Bámaca—of Bámaca, who was the husband of the American lawyer, Jennifer Harbury.

RAMÓN CADENA: Yes, exactly, exactly. She has been fighting for this case against the impunity, but it has been impossible. And the constitutional court is right now blocking this case. So I think if he gets into power, definitely the case is going to be affected. And we have heard that he wants to change the attorney general that is right now appointed, so it will be very negative for justice.

AMYGOODMAN: And, Ramón Cadena, these are trials of soldiers, and they are getting many years in prison, thousands of years in prison. What about the United States?

RAMÓN CADENA: Just I want to explain that the judges, first of all, they said that they wanted to give all of these years for each person that was killed, but the years that they will be legally in jail are 50 years. So this is just a symbolic ruling.

Now, yes, the United States, I think there should be an investigation regarding the involvement of the United States in these enormous massacres. And we hope that once the case of genocide advances, there will be a possibility of pointing out that other actors, such as the case of the United States, who was involved, deeply involved in this case.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go to one last clip, and this was of a soldier. After the four soldiers were sentenced Tuesday, one of the convicted officers said he felt no regret for what he had done.

CARLOSCARIAS: [translated] I don’t regret anything, because due to the noble institution I belong to, and continue to belong to, because it’s in my veins. The Guatemalan army, I don’t mind taking the blame for you. I don’t care, because I know there will always be a soldier at the four cardinal points looking after Guatemalans, as I did myself. All my colleagues who have died during the war, who were there to defend Guatemala, so that Guatemala is what it is now, I think if this is the payment I need to make, I accept it kindly.

AMYGOODMAN: He is making an important point here, Annie Bird. He says he was part of the Guatemalan army, and he did it for that. In fact, that is true, isn’t that right?

ANNIEBIRD: That is exactly true. And he also made another good point, in that he played an important role, and the Guatemalan army played an important role, in making Guatemala what it is today. And Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The levels of violence have increased. They’re at higher levels of violence than—of killing than during many of the years of the armed conflict. And that’s, you know, because of organized crime, drug trafficking, the war against drug. And the fact of the matter is that many of the military networks during the war were involved in organized crime activities, as death squads, as—you know, involved in drug-trafficking and car-thieving networks and whatnot. And those networks continue to operate today in Guatemala, and they place people within the justice system. You know, these networks control courts, control sections of the attorney general’s office. And so, people in Guatemala have been in a really difficult struggle over, you know, 25—over 20 years to try to bring the Guatemalan justice system to a point where it can undertake these trials, because the networks of organized crime that have influence within the justice system use that influence to illegally block justice. And so, last year, for example, there was—

AMYGOODMAN: We have five seconds.

ANNIEBIRD: —an attorney general named, with strong ties to organized crime, and after six months of really important struggle, they finally had a very good attorney general named, who has moved on cases like these. And those are important advances and are necessary not just for trying crimes of the past, but for ending the violence that today Guatemalans suffer.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Annie Bird, co-director of Rights Action, and Ramón Cadena, joining us from Guatemala City in Guatemala, the ad hoc judge who heard the Las Dos Erres massacre case for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.